Moneyball 4K Review: Brad Pitt Sports Movie Is an All-Time Great
It’s been 15 years since Moneyball was released in theaters and garnered critical acclaim. Undoubtedly one of the best movies starring Brad Pitt, the Bennett Miller-directed film is a stellar look at sabermetrics and how the Oakland Athletics used it to the team’s advantage in real life. Featuring stellar performances from Pitt, Jonah Hill, and the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, it’s a true joy to revisit the sports movie with the Moneyball 4K release.
“Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) challenges the system and defies conventional wisdom when he is forced to rebuild his small-market team on a limited budget. Despite opposition from the old guard, the media, fans, and their own field manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Beane – with the help of a young, number-crunching, Yale-educated economist (Jonah Hill) – develops a roster of misfits and along the way, forever changes the way the game is played,” says the official synopsis.
Expertly directed by Miller from a script by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, Moneyball is a great look at how Billy Beane managed to change baseball and compete at the top level despite having a fraction of the salaries of behemoths like the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. One of the best cast films of the 2010s, it features a revelatory performance by Jonah Hill, while Pitt, Hoffman, and Robin Wright are as great as they usually are. The film is inherently rewatchable and has aged wonderfully, as it’s entertaining from start to finish, even if you don’t care about baseball, as it gets to the humanity of the underdog story.
Back in 2013, Sony released a second Blu-ray of Moneyball that was “mastered in 4K,” and this seems to share the same transfer, albeit no longer being downsampled. It’s not a drastic difference, but being in native 4K means that it looks better and has more detail than before. The film also sounds great, with a strong DTS-HD 5.1 master audio mix. It’s not really a film you need to upgrade for, but if you’re buying it for the first time, then this is the version to get.
The Moneyball 4K features a nice selection of bonus features, although there’s sadly no audio commentary track. There are three deleted scenes totaling 12 minutes, a great blooper featuring Brad Pitt, and four lengthy featurettes that add well over an hour of content going into the film adaptation, striving for authenticity, its casting, and how Billy Beane influenced baseball. Finally, it includes the theatrical trailer, which was weirdly absent from Blu-ray releases.
Moneyball 4K Review: Final Verdict
The Moneyball 4K is the best that the Brad Pitt movie has ever looked at home. Featuring a sterling transfer, this 15th-anniversary release is done right. While I would’ve loved some new bonus features, this release looks and sounds great and makes an all-time great film available at its highest quality.
Disclosure: ComingSoon received product from the distributor for our Moneyball 4K review.
Source: Comingsoon.net