Two recreational baseball teams, the River Dogs and Adler’s 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.
A New York Times Critic's Pick! “A movie made just for me, and maybe for you as well." ... “A funny, elegiac feature directorial debut.”
Alissa Wilkinson
The New York Times
“The best baseball movie since Moneyball” ... “A change-up of a baseball movie, an elegiac ode to the humbler weekend warriors who are driven by nothing but genuine affection for the game.”
Jake Coyle
Associated Press
“Everyone who’s ever played for a crappy amateur sports team should go see Eephus.”
Dan Kois
Slate
Directors' Fortnight
Cannes Film Festival 2024
Main Slate
New York Film Festival 2024
"The best sports movie in years"
Alex Papaioannou
In Session
"More than a baseball movie"
Brianna Zigler
Paste
"A grand and sentimental drama"
Richard Brody
The New Yorker
"A wry and lovely baseball movie that pitches slowballs of quiet wisdom."
Jessica Kiang
Variety
“Carson Lund treats the power of a shared interest with profound, elegiac empathy.”
Jake Cole
Slant Magazine
“Eephus has about it a mournful, lightly absurd poetry of the mundane, a rapt attention to the intimacy of transience and the meanings we make from relics and rituals of a time we’re passing through.”
Isaac Feldberg
RogerEbert.com
“Eephus isn’t exactly a baseball movie — it’s something closer to movie-baseball, where characters endlessly jostle back and forth under no real time constraints, watching the day slowly pass them by, simply out of love for the sport.”
Jordan Mintzer
The Hollywood Reporter
