Brad Pitt's best

Rating: 9/10 (1 October 2011)

Moneyball is the story of Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager, trying to compete against "the big boys" with a small budget team and no way to buy the players he needs. While visiting the Cleveland Indians' management trying to make deals for better players, he meets a young man on their staff who has devised a way to assign a numerical value to players based on their ability to get on base, rather than the more traditional ways that baseball players are rated. Instead of buying a player from the Indians, he hires the statistician and together they rebuild the A's team after the loss of three key players who move on to richer teams. Brad Pitt's performance is stellar; you forget that he's Brad Pitt and believe that he's Billy Beane, which is the true measure of a great actor. This is the best Brad Pitt has ever been in a roll, and he dominates every one of his scenes. Jonah Hill is excellent as the naive though brilliant statistician and Philip Seymour Hoffman shines as the team's head coach who butts heads with Beane time after time over the new way of staffing the team. People in the movie audience applauded when the A's won 20 games in a row; you could feel that the audience was totally "there" in the moment, because the actors make you believe you are seeing the true story of Billy Beane and the A's. Great movie, great acting, wonderful story that will keep you rooting for the A's even if you're a die-hard Yankee fan like myself.