Trouble With the Curve

Directed by Robert Lorenz

(PG-13)

**

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Clint Eastwood’s latest is “ploddingly professional,” said Nick Pinkerton in The Village Voice. Working with a first-time director, the 82-year-old star of the Republican Party’s recent national convention plays an old-school Major League Baseball scout whose eyesight has deteriorated so badly that his lawyer daughter decides to help him evaluate a hotshot high school slugger. “If you admire his stubborn eccentricity,” Eastwood may hold your interest with his latest turn as “a stopped-up curmudgeon.” But the story feels drawn from a screenplay-writing textbook rather than from life. As the daughter who teaches old Dad a few lessons, Amy Adams “does her endearing best to lighten things up,” said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. She has “some enjoyable encounters” with Justin Timberlake, who plays a rival scout. Unfortunately, Eastwood is “mostly a tiresome grump,” and the overabundance of mawkish sentiment feels “bush league all the way.” The story’s predictability makes you wish that Eastwood “had been given more to work with,” said Bill Goodykoontz in the Phoenix Arizona Republic. You can’t help wondering if he’d have found more in the story if he were the director.