By Daily,Editor

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Starry sports drama following the rise of Robert Redford’s baseball player

Certificate: pg

Barry Levinson’s sports drama follows the career of baseball player Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford), from his childhood home in 1910s Nebraska all the way to the Major League. The supporting cast is extremely starry, even by the standard set by its lead actor, with Redford joined by Robert Duvall, Kim Basinger, Barbara Hershey and Glenn Close, who picked up an Oscar nomination for her trouble.

Based on the darker novel by Bernard Malamud, The Natural feels like a good ol’ soft gloss story about the importance of backing talent with hard graft, especially in its cornball early scenes, but it’s not quite as simple as that. It also looks and sounds gorgeous, in that old school Hollywood way (another of its four Oscar nominations was for cinematography) and has the lure of the classic by the sheer weight of its production values. (137 minutes)