It might not be Kevin Costner's best baseball movie but For Love of the Game is still a solid baseball film after 25 years.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 17, 2024

It's kind of like watching an actual baseball game: deliberate and slow, but occasionally perfect.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 27, 2023

"Bull Durham" is a more powerful movie than "For Love of the Game," so Kevin Costner might be better as a savvy minor league catcher than a hall-of-fame major league pitcher, but the fact is, Costner is simply and utterly baseballic. He's baseballerific.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 10, 2020

Every scene away from the ballpark is in foul territory.

| Original Score: C | Apr 13, 2017

For Love of the Game asks whether the same qualities that make an athlete a champion don't also destroy his happiness. The answer, unfortunately, is long-winded and redundant... But some of the baseball scenes are good.

Full Review | May 8, 2014

This is no perfect -- or even half-perfect -- game. It's another movie where conventions are subbed for life lessons, where the emotions are cued by golden oldies and where the motivation (at least on the studio's part) isn't love of the game but money.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 8, 2014

Here are two things that definitely don't go together: baseball and piano music.

| May 8, 2014

The baseball sequences are fabulous, not least because Costner looks and moves like a real player a rarity for actors in sports movies... But the love story, a five-year off-and-on affair, is little more than a sop to Costner's romantic faithful.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 8, 2014

On the field, Costner is consistent, but his exploration of Billy's romantic dilemma is superficial and often wooden.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 8, 2014

Those flashbacks will drive you nuts. As if baseball didn't drag on long enough, almost every inning or out of that Yankees game is punctuated by a memory.

| May 8, 2014

For love of the God, what is wrong with the once-likable Kevin Costner?

| May 8, 2014

I'm all for romance, you understand. But what makes this a drawback is that these people are all wrong for each other and that the filmmakers don't seem to know it.

| May 8, 2014

The rhythms of the game feel right; the rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on for over two hours.

| May 8, 2014

Kevin Costner is back starring in his third baseball movie, and after those two box office home runs, Mighty Kevin has struck out.

| May 8, 2014

Vanity is one thing, but Costner's act is beginning to feel like a particularly self-righteous -- and tiresome -- form of pathology. Someone should tell him that an actor's job is to disappear into his characters, not vice-versa.

| Original Score: 1/4 | May 8, 2014

Not a frame reflects the distinctively edgy touch that director Sam Raimi brought to films as diverse as The Evil Dead and A Simple Plan.

| May 8, 2014

For Love Of The Game seems lost, as one overlong melodramatic interlude follows another, each more predictable than the entirely predictable game itself.

| May 8, 2014

For Love of the Game's earnestness seems itself like a desperate cry for attention.

| May 8, 2014

Far more horrifying than Evil Dead, Sam Raimi's attempt at making a sports-oriented romance strikes out, forfeits and loses three times before its two hours and 10 minutes are up.

| Original Score: 1/5 | May 8, 2014

This guy is earnest, tireless, noble in his devotion to America's pastime and mostly dull as branch water.

Full Review | May 8, 2014