My All American

Writer-director Angelo Pizzo (adapting Jim Dent's biography) recounts the short life of Freddie Steinmark, a University of Texas football player who helped his team and Coach Darrell Royal (Aaron Eckhart) to a national championship before dying of bone cancer at 22. Pizzo gets off to an awkward start, with a reporter interviewing the aging Royal and telling him things he already knows about himself, but once the movie flashes back to the 1960s, sincere performances and an eye for period detail turn the movie into a good old-fashioned sports tearjerker. Michael Reilly Burke and Robin Tunney are good as Steinmark's parents, while as Steinmark's devoted high-school sweetheart, Sarah Bolger (last seen in the god-awful The Lazarus Effect, where nobody escaped unscathed) makes a mark for herself as someone to watch. J.L.