Cobb is a refreshingly spiky antidote to all the Hollywood paeans to the glory of the game.

| Feb 21, 2018

Most biopics mistakenly try to take us from cradle to grave and end up skimming the surface. The wisdom of Cobb is that writer-director Ron Shelton knows that the close study of a single day can decode a human life.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 6, 2014

A curiously gripping amalgam of Patton, Citizen Kane and Melvin and Howard.

Full Review | May 6, 2014

To watch Tommy Lee Jones re-create the persona of the Hall of Famer in Cobb is to encounter the greatest SOB ever to come down the pike -- in or out of the domain of sports. The trek is hardly entertaining.

| May 6, 2014

While the story of Cobb himself is a worthy one (Shelton's treatment, believe it or not, even has its similarities to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane), Shelton shortchanges the very game that made the man famous.

| May 6, 2014

Unfortunately, the movie just makes Stump look like a self-important jerk, possibly a bigger jerk than Cobb, and Wuhl's affable, weightless performance doesn't help.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 6, 2014

Stump is well-played by affable Robert Wuhl, who has the unenviable responsibility of representing the one sane man in Ty's crazy universe.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 20, 2013

Cobb's accomplishments on the ball field would make for an absorbing documentary, but it's the passions and pitfalls of his private life that dominate Ron Shelton's melodramatic film.

| Mar 19, 2013

Cobb cuts right through the winner-take-all ethos of American athletics. It's a raw, inspired, audaciously funny, and unexpectedly moving collaboration between the writer-director Ron Shelton and Tommy Lee Jones.

Full Review | Mar 19, 2013

Ron Shelton, whose Bull Durham and White Men Can't Jump were jokey tales of disillusionment set in the sporting world, here redefines the life of an idol with a certain honest savagery.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 19, 2013

Ty Cobb is such a towering figure in this motion picture that it's easy to overlook Al Stump -- and Robert Wuhl's feisty, witty performance in the thankless role.

| Mar 19, 2013

[Jones] lets it all loose here. It's the performance of a lifetime: full of menace and venom, eloquence and fire, rot and pathos, crackling rawness and realism.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 19, 2013

The result, whether Cobb is wailing about greatness or ruminating about the dark circumstances around his father's death, is a performance too operatic and out of control.

| Mar 19, 2013

This is a messy movie, sometimes repetitive, sometimes too compressed and allusive. But that's like saying Ty Cobb was not a very good sport -- irrelevant in comparison to the horrific fascination of his story.

| Mar 21, 2011

The movie never equals the performance, but still fascinating to watch.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 16, 2011

Massively underrated.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 5, 2008

Director Shelton is a master at locker room drama, and helped by a towering performance of snarling egomania and drug-fuelled bitterness from Jones, he tackles the dichotomies of [Cobb] with engaging enthusiasm.

| Aug 5, 2008

It's such a potent and courageous wreck of a movie that it's worth more than most 'successes.'

| Aug 5, 2008

Tommy Lee Jones is superb in the title role, but writer-director Ron Shelton unwisely chose to structure the film as a two-character piece, thus placing undue attention on the lackluster character of Cobb's biographer, Al Stump.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 5, 2008

It's unclear just how much sympathy we are to extend the unrepentant and bullying title character.

Full Review | Aug 5, 2008