Phil Alden Robinson
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A House of Dynamite (2025)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
influenced by The Sum of All Fears (2002)
Themes Plot
21st Century thrillers like The Sum of All Fears…
Movies like “The Sum of All Fears” and “Fail Safe” have depicted this kind of scenario before, but this movie looks at it from a different angle.
The Sum of All Fears used similar logic, but did so much more quickly to brush over the holes in it.
This is more Field of Dreams than Bull Durham: baseball here is seen as something magical - Redford has a mystical bat named "Wonderboy", which he fashioned from a tree struck by lightning - rather than merely a sport.
The 1984 film The Natural was a mythic and mesmerizing movie about America's favorite pastime that also saluted the heroism of the lonely individualist.
Interstellar (2014)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
influenced by Field of Dreams (1989)
Themes Visuals
Of course Nolan knows he’s channeling all sorts of heartland-set farm-family movies, including “Field of Dreams” and Shyamalan’s “Signs.”
The characters, and consequently the acting, rarely transcend comic-strip simplicity; Cooper’s family inhabit their own belt of purest corn somewhere between Field of Dreams and Ray Bradbury at his folksiest.
McConaughey plays Joseph “Coop” Cooper, a widowed engineer whose ace piloting skills are as vestigial as this movie’s Field of Dreams version of baseball now appears to be.
Many of Interstellar's finest moments are familiar; visual allusions to The Grapes of Wrath and Field of Dreams, and of course Kubrick's 2001, including TARS, a robot shaped like a walking monolith, with Bill Irwin wisecracking about ejecting someone through an airlock.
The film’s central family (headed by Cooper, grounded after the dismantling of NASA) lives on a corn farm, for goodness’ sake, like the gentle Iowans in " Field of Dreams " (a film whose daddy-issues-laden story syncs up nicely with the narrative of "Interstellar").
Cringe-worthy, it's true, but just as Field of Dreams finds a way through its mess of cornfields and ghost doctors to locate a hard emotional truth about fathers and sons, Interstellar navigates its way through four-too-many readings of Dylan Thomas to speak true to exactly whatever it is about fathers and daughters.
Most baseball movies pursue the romance of the game – the romance of the flawed Adonis (The Natural), the romance of nostalgia (Field of Dreams), or simply the romance of the romcom (Bull Durham).
From what may seem, on the surface, to be dry subject matter, director Bennett Miller delivers a wordy but well-paced and thrilling film, closer to co-writer Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network than previous baseball-themed big hitters Bull Durham or Field of Dreams.
Moneyball brings these elements together in a manner that introduces that most romantic of baseball pictures, Field of Dreams, to that most 21st-century of films about technological and cultural transformation, The Social Network.
No jock schmaltzfest like “Field of Dreams,” the whip-smart “Moneyball” is a crowd-pleasing baseball movie for people — like me — who don’t like baseball movies.
The Natural made it mythical, Field of Dreams made it spiritual, and Bull Durham made it sexy.
Anyone expecting an emotional “Field of Dreams” or mythical “The Natural” might be disappointed not to find anything that lodges a lump in the throat.
“Red” reminded me a bit of “Sneakers,” a 1992 caper with Robert Redford about a bunch of washed-up, written-off spooks who get together for a new job.
It's like a version of "Harvey" where we see James Stewart and the rabbit, but not the wondering or dyspeptic people around them.
While taking a Korean perspective on the much fabled “American dream”, it also evokes memories of bittersweet and torrid tales as diverse as Field of Dreams and The Mosquito Coast , where one family member is seemingly risking it all in pursuit of a goal that maybe they alone believe in.
Yuen’s journey lies somewhere between Field of Dreams and Death of a Salesman , a man suffering from his own ambition and tossed about by the winds of fate; it’s a beautiful, meaty role for an actor who’s been taking greater chances like this and 2018’s Burning ; he’s come a long way since The Walking Dead .
Sometimes they’re about sports, or daddy issues, or both — see Field of Dreams — and other times they hide their tears behind formidable violence, like the terrific MMA sibling drama Warrior, or the matched macho historical pairing of Gladiator and Braveheart.
This is far more character-driven and introspective, but its themes and approach echo film classics from John Ford’s The Searchers to Apocalypse Now, and even the father-son dynamic that was so movingly a part of Field of Dreams, all movies in which our key player in on a mission that takes detours beyond what you might normally expect from big-budget Hollywood movies.
17 of the Most Dramatic Sports Movie Moments: From 'Rocky' to 'McFarland, USA' (Photos) “McFarland, USA” (2015) Kevin Costner follows up a string of beloved sports films, including “Field of Dreams” and “Bull Durham,” with a drama about a cross-country team at a predominantly Latino high school.
We see this in flashback, the staging an echo of Field of Dreams, a hazy promise that decent folk will always turn up to celebrate a pure and simple American ideal.
Finally the mists and the cornstalks part, and a Christlike figure appears: Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), baseball's ultimate outsider-hero, and the central figure in John Sayles' "Eight Men Out" and, a few years ago, "The Natural," where he's the inspiration for Robert Redford's Roy Hobbes.
"Eight Men Out" used the soiled Sox to underscore the modern decline of honor.
Gilpin may be surrounded by actors of whom most audiences are more likely to recognize than know by name — Sturgill Simpon (Queen & Slim), Kate Nowlin (Young Adult), Amy Madigan (Field of Dreams), Wayne Duvall (The Kitchen), and Ike Barinholtz (Suicide Squad) — and a few audiences will recognize immediately — Roberts, Justin Hartley (This Is Us), Glenn Howerton (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), and, of course, Hillary Swank (Logan Lucky) — but this is entirely Gilpin’s show.
Hell, even Amy Madigan stops by to make us go, “Oh, we should watch Field of Dreams later.”
There's really no excuse for Real Steel, a Frankenstein contraption made up of spare parts from middle-American fairytales like Field of Dreams and underdog sports intrigues starting with Rocky , I guess, and building all the way through to junk like The Rookie and any number of films just like it that appear with what seems like annual reliability.
When four year old Amanda McCready (Madeline O'Brien, "The Legend of Lucy Keyes") disappears from her Dorchester home, her Aunt Bea (Amy Madigan, "Field of Dreams," "Pollock") enlists the aid of local private detectives, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck, "Ocean's Thirteen," "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," "The Heartbreak Kid"), to get into the neighborhood's underbelly and find her.
All of this would work better if Robinson built up the reality of the town more, made the citizens a more palpable presence, as Frank Capra did in Hollywood's greatest fable-fantasy, "It's a Wonderful Life."
And so Under the Tuscan Sun becomes a female Field of Dreams (1989): If you restore it, they will come.
If a black man wants to get his groove on with that rare breed of soul sister that actually likes Kevin Costner, a little weed goes a long way in keeping him awake during Field of Dreams.
Lancaster turns in another of the great supporting performances that have become his specialty in recent years - he's as good as he was in "Local Hero."
Moreover, there are no shortages of Star Wars easter eggs and there’s a real Field of Dreams moment near the end.
All of the father/son pathos here was done better in the John Slattery sequence in Endgame – that is, when the movie’s not lifting straight from Field of Dreams instead.