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

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

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

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

Massively underrated.

| Original Score: 4/5 | 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

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

Full Review | Aug 5, 2008

Shelton's film is about the nature of truth and popular myth, about the single-minded pursuit of glory, and the horrors within. It's also very funny.

| Jun 24, 2006

Even allowing for the intentional excesses of such an episode, delicacy is a casualty here.

Full Review | May 20, 2003

This histrionic portrait of the most celebrated cur in sports history comes across like a fly ball that thuds on the ground.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Jun 18, 2002

Shelton's strong, stinging film -- one of the year's best -- wants to get at something ingrained in the American character: the irrational desire to make saints of sports heroes.

| May 12, 2001

It's not enough, and you end up feeling -- despite Jones' dead-on performance -- like you've been cheated. It looks good. It feels right. It gets the job done.... But there's nothing there. Just like Cobb. Maybe that's the point.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Of all the good and great movies that have slipped through the cracks in recent years, none has been treated as appallingly as Cobb.

| Jan 1, 2000

It's the kind of film where you admire the craftsmanship and artistry while questioning the wisdom of the project itself.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Cobb turns into a noisy, cantankerous buddy picture.

| Original Score: D | Dec 2, 1994