Two recreational baseball teams, the River Dogs and Adlers Paint, have been meeting on their New England field on Sunday afternoons for longer than anyone can remember. These middle-aged sportsmen can’t run as fast as they used to or connect as reliably with a pitch, but their vigorous appetite for socializing, squabbling, and busting chops remains undiminished. After the know-nothing county board opts to raze the baseball diamond to make way for a school, the teams meet for one final game at their beloved Soldier’s Field, with girlfriends, kids, and local hooligans as intermittent spectators. As day turns to night and innings bleed together, the players face the uncertainty of a new era.
Lovingly laid in a vanished Massachusetts of the mid-1990s, Carson Lund’s poignant feature debut plays like a lazy afternoon, perfectly attuned to the rhythms of America’s eternal pastime. Named for a rarely-deployed curveball, Eephus is both a ribald comedy for the baseball connoisseur and a movie for anyone who’s ever lamented their community slipping away.
Warning: Heavy Profanity
100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
⚾ Critic’s Pick ⚾
“A movie made just for me, and maybe for you as well …. A funny, elegiac feature directorial debut.” – Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times
“The Best Baseball Movie in Years. Everyone who’s ever played for a crappy amateur sports team should go see Eephus.” – Dan Kois, Slate
“The best baseball movie since Moneyball. In this slow-pitch gem of a baseball movie, time is slipping away, but they’re going down swinging. Richly detailed and mordantly deadpan, Eephus adopts their pace of play, soaking up all the sesame-seed flavor that goes along with it.” – Jake Coyle, Associated Press
“Wonderfully funny and melancholy …. Modest and moving, it’s a new sports-movie classic, as sneakily effective as the pitch which gives it its title … Eephus has a great, loving feel for its ramshackle setting and those who inhabit it. ” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
“Where Lund depicts baseball, he seemingly X-rays it to reveal a plethora of fine points and arcana that, once grasped, yield up the hidden meanings of infinitesimal gestures … In presenting the game, Lund develops a passionately analytical aesthetic of baseball that offers a corrective to the way it’s usually depicted. His documentary-based method, in rejecting the patterned routines of television coverage, intensifies the drama of the sport itself.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“An adorably existential, off-kilter take on the sports movie … A wry and lovely baseball movie that pitches slowballs of quiet wisdom.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety
“There may be no better movie about baseball” – Jordan Raup, The Film Stage
