42 (2013)

One of the all-time great sports movies — primarily because it's one of the all-time great sports stories.

Helgeland works in what I think of as a conservative — or maybe it's just really, really basic — neoclassical Hollywood style, spelling everything out, letting the story unfold in a plainspoken and deliberate fashion, with a big, wide, open pictorial camera eye. It's like the latter-day Clint Eastwood style, applied to material that's as traditional as can be.

42 is excessively retro, neglecting the urge to pepper scenes with comic relief or oppressing, flashy conflict.

It’s a perfectly unexceptional but slickly made, sincerely acted, often entertaining, sometimes manipulative and always watchable blend of action on the diamond and bravery behind the scenes that will please baseball fanatics more than movie historians. It’s a good enough biopic to make you wish it were a better motion picture.

Earnest, righteous, historically accurate and often entertaining.