Moneyball

Moneyball (2011) is Bennett Miller's drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the general manager of baseball's Oakland Athletics, a club running on roughly a third of what giants like the Yankees spend.

After a playoff loss and the departure of three star players, Beane stops trying to outbid richer teams. In Cleveland he runs into Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a soft-spoken Yale graduate who rates players by cold numbers instead of a scout's gut — on-base percentages and undervalued veterans everyone else had written off. The old scouts revolt, manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) quietly sabotages the plan, and Beane bets his whole career on a roster nobody wanted.

It's drawn from Michael Lewis's nonfiction book and the real 2002 season, when the Athletics ripped off an American League record of 21 straight wins. The script passed through Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, and the film landed six Academy Award nominations. At heart it's about stubborn arithmetic cracking a sport's century-old habits. Stream Moneyball (2011) online on iFILM.