For Love of the Game

Boston Globe Jay Carr

After revitalizing baseball movies with "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham," he's now three for three with the funny, quirky, rueful, and richly textured For Love of the Game.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Goes down like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot day.

San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham

It is impossible to think of anyone but Costner in this role. His commitment and sincerity are never in doubt.

Portland Oregonian Diana Abu-Jaber

More of a bunt than a home run.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Those who have even a small soft spot for baseball's soothing rhythms will be hard-pressed to resist it.

Mr. Showbiz Eleonore Snow

None of their efforts can turn this ho-hum, mildly entertaining line-drive single into a solid, explosive home run.

TNT RoughCut Jennifer Nowitzky

A bona fide, no-doubt-about-it love story disguised as a sports movie.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

It could do without any kind of love story, let alone the one it got.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

The game is cool to watch, and the love story is assertive enough to hook even the stodgiest ESPN man.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The weighty themes of loss, regret and abdication of personal responsibility are undermined by the reverential use of baseball as a symbol of mankind's potential for selfless greatness.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

The real love affair in For Love of the Game is between Costner and himself.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

This sentimental drama is wildly uneven as it switches between ballpark scenes, which are very involving, and romantic episodes, which are badly overplayed.

LA Weekly Paul Malcolm

The film's larger, surprisingly mature emotional rhythms are strong enough to pull it through.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Costner's determination to avoid change keeps this baseball movie at a low line drive when it might have knocked one into the bleachers.

Variety Robert Koehler

Costner is as uneven as the storytelling itself, stone cold at moments, shimmeringly real in others.

USA Today Mike Clark

Tested my own love of the game more than anything since the time Roseanne screeched the national anthem.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Much of this movie seems a crock.

San Francisco Examiner Edvins Beitiks

A piece of baseball fluff...Costner cinema, pure and simple.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Watching Raimi's visual style and narrative verve flatten out into this pale reiteration of a middle-aged-male weepie is an exercise in modern horror.

Film.com Sean Means

Costner's serious-as-a-heart-attack performance...slowly kills the movie's energy in a gooey morass of forced sincerity.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Plays like an unholy union of "The Natural" and "The Prince of Tides." Too bad...Build a movie as a shrine to baseball and they will come. Suckers!

Film.com Moira Macdonald

Call it baseball interruptus, or just call it a missed opportunity.

The New York Times Lawrence Van Gelder

Sometimes even a talented lineup produces unexceptional results.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

It's the most lugubrious and soppy love story in many a moon, a step backward for director Sam Raimi after "A Simple Plan."

New York Post Rod Dreher

It's "The Postman" on a pitcher's mound.

Time Richard Corliss

You will simply want to shoot yourself by the third inning.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Costner himself is the doggedly humorless heart and soul (and brains?) of this monumentally maudlin picture.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

A dreary, humorless affair, with no real feeling for the rhythms of either baseball or love.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The baseball half of the story just slightly works. ... Nothing in [the other] half of the film works.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

For the first 100 minutes or so I found this hokey but serviceable; after that my watch became more meaningful than anything I could locate on-screen.

Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday

This dialogue isn't helped by two actors who look terrific but can barely choke out a word that sounds remotely authentic or spontaneous.