Bull Durham: Critic Reviews

Bull Durham is a film with spring fever, a giddy, playful look at life in baseball's minor leagues.

Bull Durham, the new baseball movie starring Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon, eases up on you, lazy as a cloud, and carries you off in a mood of exquisite delight.

Writer/director Ron Shelton lobs juicy lines to players Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, and they all hit home.

Bull Durham is a treasure of a movie because it knows so much about baseball and so little about love.

There's a lot of laughter and enjoyment on the way to the lockers.

Costner is a natural as the dyed-in-the-wool ballplayer. His best lines are when he's philosophizing, like on being an All-American male who hates anything by Susan Sontag.

If one was to make a list of the best baseball-themed movies of all time, Bull Durham would have to be in consideration.

Shelton locates the tension and the humor between pitches, between ball games, between the sheets. It helps too that he has written the wittiest, busiest screenplay since Moonstruck, and that his three stars do their very best screen work.

A romantic fable about baseball.

Classic performances, witty and insightful script, this is about so much more than baseball and will no doubt prove to be a quiet classic.

Deserves its status among sports films, but its ongoing appeal reflects that it's something more: an old-fashioned romantic comedy that succeeds in establishing and deepening memorable characters through memorably flavorful dialogue. [Blu-ray]

Shelton's sharp sense of how these characters interact and improve each other (both knowingly and unknowingly) gives the film its impact

An unadulterated joy of a sports movie that can't be recommended highly enough.

...one of most entertaining and flat-out indelible baseball films within modern cinema...

...the best sports movie ever.

Might have been the greatest baseball movie ever made if not for the sluggish centerpiece performance by Kevin Costner.

Smutty, terrific fun.

Shelton, nominated for a best-original-screenplay Oscar, nails the details of minor-league ball visually as well, from the players' superstitious pregame rituals to the dead, painted-green grass on the field.

Tim Robbins acts circles around Kevin Costner.

Marvellous stuff.

A witty, sexy baseball comedy with a knowing world-weary outlook.

Ron Shelton, who spent five years in the Baltimore Orioles farm system, has put together the snappiest, funniest and most poignant love letter to baseball ever written, though its ultimate moral deals with matters of the heart.