Metacritic-Rezensionen

A lively, engaging and moving documentary.

The movie about his life and legend, written and directed by Sean Mullin, has two purposes and succeeds delightfully at both.

Serving as a potent reminder of the stellar athletic ability that, in time, had been overshadowed by his admittedly outsized personality, the affectionate It Ain’t Over offers a winning coda to the career assessment of the late, great Yogi Berra.

It’s not a warts-and-all treatment because, at least in this telling, there are no warts. It’s more about securing Berra among a new generation of fans as one of the greatest players who ever lived. And on that front, it more than succeeds.

The Berra family tells the stories with familiarity and affection, often laughing or crying: this is well-trod ground, tall tales, the narrative of their family.

It’s a sweetly sentimental documentary, acknowledging Berra’s own role in leaning into the “cartoon” image that the sporting media built around him and the confusion that created.

Berra’s advice, of course, tends to be dizzyingly contradictory but deceptively simple. The same could be said of It Ain’t Over, which zips through Berra’s life without ever feeling rushed. When it comes to Mullin’s well-paced depiction of a misunderstood legend, Berra’s words put it best: “You can observe a lot by watching.”

The movie itself is more of a square than a circle — straightforward and honorific, peppered with old and newer archival footage.

Sean Mullin’s documentary It Ain’t Over is literally inside baseball. The film is essentially a Berra family project, an attempt to rehabilitate the professional reputation of someone who often doesn’t get his due as a player.

[An] affectionate documentary.