Big Fan Scores with Critics

Critics are big fans of Big Fan, a funny yet tragic look at football devotees directed by The Wrestler screenwriter Robert Siegel. Here’s what they’re saying:  

• Star Patton Oswalt “gives a tour de force performance,” writes Ray Greene of Box Office Magazine, and Siegel finds “the highest of human stakes in vast and neglected worlds most films don’t even bother to notice, much less to dramatize.”

• Oswalt’s character “is a setup for an easy joke,” says Peter Travers of Rolling Stone. “That the joke never comes is a tribute” to the movie, which “refuses to sentimentalize or ridicule its besieged hero worshipper.”
• It’s “one of those rare films that is totally unpredictable, funny and sort of painfully depressing all at the same time,” writes Sara Vilkomerson of the New York Observer. Don’t worry, sports haters: “There is zero actual football in this movie.”

(More Patton Oswalt stories.)