Moneyball

Michael Lewis’ 2003 nonfiction bestseller becomes at least the best Brad Pitt-Jonah Hill baseball movie ever. It’s about how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Pitt), with help from a nerdy Ivy League number cruncher (Hill), reconfigured his team and the sport by packaging less expensive players in statistically formidable combinations. Nimbly scripted by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, if a tad less nimbly directed by Bennett Miller, the film supplies its own grain of salt: Take it from Hollywood, success isn’t just a matter of spending more! The cast itself is a formidable combination, also with Robin Wright and Kerris Dorsey as Beane’s ex-wife and daughter, respectively, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as an intransigent dugout manager. That such a literally spreadsheet-intensive story could register real human thought and feeling at all has to count as some kind of triumph.