George Thomas Movies

Bennett Miller's adaptation of Michael Lewis' non-fiction best seller Moneyball stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, a one-time phenom who flamed out in the big leagues and now works as the GM for the Oakland Athletics, a franchise that's about to lose their three best players to free agency. Because the team isn't in a financial position to spend as much as perennial favorites like the Yankees and the Red Sox, Beane realizes he needs to radically change how he evaluates what players can bring to the squad. After he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), an Ivy League economics major working as an executive assistant for scouting on another team, Beane realizes he's found the man who understands how to subvert the system of assessing players that's been in place for nearly a century. However, as the duo begin to acquire players that seem too old, injured, or inept to play major-league baseball, they face stiff resistance from both the A's longtime scouts and the team's manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who outright refuses to allow Beane's more-nontraditional acquisitions to play. Moneyball screened at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

Hide and Go Shriek is pedestrian stalker nonsense, this time featuring the usual group of sex-mad teens camping out overnight in a gigantic furniture superstore (owned by one of the kids' parents) and being picked off by a mysterious killer. The creepy ex-con, who both lives and works at the store, is presented as an obvious red herring, but the killer's true identity comes straight out of left field with a loopy homosexual subplot that serves virtually no purpose other than to tie up one of several dozen loose ends. Competently filmed but shamelessly derivative of countless other slasher films (which weren't particularly original in the first place), this non-thriller offers little of interest apart from a director with a cute name -- the one and only Skip Schoolnik. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi