Moneyball

AroView: The business of professional sport is examined with cracking insight by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin in this biopic of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane, who radically introduced statistical analysis into player recruitment in order to turnaround a losing baseball team.

Like THE SOCIAL NETWORK’s dorm room geniuses, Sorkin and co-writer Steven Zaillian transform the unglamorous hard slog of sports management into something exciting and urgent, with events allowed to unfold in the office rather than on the playing field. While baseball fans may yearn for the drama and big personalities synonymous with the sport, the film’s best virtue is its unsentimental approach to winning and losing, with its “adapt or die” mentality and celebration of ingenuity delivering an ever-relevant message to crumbling business empires and stubborn old boy networks.

“A smart, intense and moving film that isn’t so much about sports as about the war between intuition and statistics.” ~Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times