Cobb

In the years surrounding WWI, Ty Cobb was baseball's most successful player, but this dark, probing portrait isn't really a sports movie. It focuses on 1960, when the Georgia Peach had gone sour: a bitter, lonely old man intent on fostering his legend even as he knows that death is upon him. Summoning successful sports writer Al Stump (Wuhl) to write his biography, the egomaniacal, cantankerous Cobb proceeds to dictate a hagiography. The reality is that Cobb's a bully, bigot and woman-beater. Shelton's film is about the nature of truth and popular myth, about the single-minded pursuit of glory, and the horrors within. It's also very funny. Jones gives a grandstand performance - this is his Patton, or even perhaps his Macbeth - as the pistol-packin', pill-poppin' Cobb, a monster who daren't look himself in the face, and refuses to apologise.