Best Sports Movie? It's "The Natural"

The seeds for “The Natural” were Bernard Malamud's, planted in his 1952 novel of the same name. The essence of Barry Levinson's film version is, however, pure Robert Redford.

Levinson's version of “The Natural” turns 25 this year, but it seems like, oh, maybe a decade ago when the movie made its premier at theaters everywhere. The film has been a timeless tale of baseball, the sort of warm, bucolic story that reminds us of how tied to our emotions the sport is.

But “The Natural” is more than a baseball tale, much in the way that “Field of Dreams,” a 1989 film littered with literary illusions to real characters, is more than a baseball tale. If any two movies can be said to define sports movies, these do.

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