YOU GOTTA BELIEVE is a sports drama based on the inspiring true story of a Little League team from Dallas, Texas who defy the odds. The movie tells the team’s journey through the eyes of Robert, the first baseman, whose father, Bobby, has terminal cancer. The boys rally around their teammate and dedicate their season to Bobby. Coach Jon begins to take coaching the boys seriously, and the team’s underdog story begins. Eventually, the team has a chance to prove themselves at the Little League World Series.

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE is a fantastic addition to the sports drama genre. It has a heartfelt story of perseverance, team camaraderie, and never giving up. The movie is based on the true story of Robert, his father’s battle with cancer, and their amazing Little League run in 2002. YOU GOTTA BELIEVE tells an inspiring, well-structured story with some phenomenal acting. The movie isn’t explicitly faith-based, but it has a brief moment of prayer. However, YOU GOTTA BELIEVE also has several relatively light obscenities and one light humorous innuendo. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for younger audiences, especially pre-teen children.

(BB, CC, L, V, S, A, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong moral worldview, with a strong father and son relationship, stresses the importance of never giving up, sticking together as a family and as a team, and perseverance through hardships, plus a man prays to God in one scene;

Foul Language:

Six or seven obscenities (including one BS word, a crude reference to male anatomy, and four or five “d” words), plus there’s a use of “mother-sucker” and a man ill with cancer throws up throughout the movie;

Violence:

A player gets injured, and his ankle is swollen, a man in the movie has cancer, and players get into a brawl, but no blood or gore is shown;

Sex:

No sex scenes, but there’s a quick light joke/innuendo about sex or lovemaking that’s easily missed (someone jokes that a woman should put her husband on a “schedule”);

Nudity:

No nudity;

Alcohol Use:

Man drinks a beer, and someone asks for a drink as a joke;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

A younger brother has a rabbit’s foot that he hopes will allow his brother to run fast, but it doesn’t work, and he throws it away, plus the boys on the Little League team are fond of calling each other and opponents names (none of the names are very graphic or obscene, but this continues throughout the movie).

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE is a sports drama about the true story of a Little League baseball team in Dallas, Texas that banded together and dedicated their inspiring, underdog season in 2002 to their coach, Bobby, who has terminal cancer and is the father of the first baseman, Robert. YOU OTTA BELIEVE is an incredibly well-told story, with loads of heart and inspiring moments, about an underdog team that defies all odds, and the movie promotes family, perseverance, looking out for other people, and prayer, but there is some foul language and name-calling.

Bobby and Jon coach a little league team in Dallas Fort Worth, Texas. Their regular season comes to an end after a tough loss in their final game of the season. Bobby tries to encourage Jon to take the team more seriously next year.

Jon and the team are offered to represent their district as an All-Star team. However, Jon is reluctant to say yes after their difficult season.

Meanwhile, Bobby passes out one day while throwing to his son, Robert, at home. He learns he has terminal cancer. While Bobby begins treatment, Jon agrees to take on coaching the Little League team to represent their district.

Competition is high, but Jon and other people begin to seriously coach the team. As the underdogs, they dedicate their season to Bobby, and their inspiring run to the 2002 Little League World Championship begins.

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE is a great sports drama about an underdog team that defies all odds. It also has a heartfelt story about a father’s love for his son and perseverance in the face of terminal cancer. YOU GOTTA BELIEVE stresses the importance of family, never giving up and sticking together as a family and as a team.

There is a scene where Bobby asks God to not take him away from his family, but the movie doesn’t have an explicitly Christian worldview. “You Gotta Believe” becomes their mantra in the movie, but that belief is directed inward toward themselves, or outwards toward their teammates, not toward God or faith. YOU GOTTA BELIEVE also has a brief scene where Robert’s younger brother has a rabbit’s foot charm that he hopes will allow his brother to run fast. It doesn’t work, however, and he throws it away.

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE has some truly inspiring and heartfelt moments. However, due to brief foul language, and adult themes of cancer and death, Movieguide® advises caution for children and young teenagers.

In one of the best scenes in I’ll Be Right There, a character reveals a family story involving an improbable getaway driver. Taking in this tale is her middle-aged daughter, who knows a thing or two about driving — although her role behind the wheel is more along the lines of schlepping to and fro than making a break for it. These two strong women are played, respectively, by Jeannie Berlin and Edie Falco, actors of ineffable down-to-earth zing. When, later in the movie, the screen fills with a slo-mo shot of them running side by side down a hospital corridor, it feels like a winking, loving gift, one of the giddy dividends from this wry take on family and midlife anxieties.

Set and shot in a Northeastern hamlet (Pearl River, in New York’s Rockland County), director Brendan Walsh’s second feature (after Centigrade) is a modestly scaled affair that benefits from its unfussy sense of place and its superb casting. I’ll Be Right There navigates a territory between comforting and thorny — much as its central character, Falco’s Wanda, weary of being the voice of reason in the midst of a whole lotta drama, balances reasonable exasperation and deep wells of patience while tending to one family member in distress after another.

Wanda is the divorced mother of two sort-of grown-up kids. Daughter Sarah (Kayli Carter) is eight months pregnant and has her heart set on a church wedding, before her due date, to Eugene (Jack Mulhern), an even-keeled fellow as easygoing as she is given to hysteria. Wanda’s floundering son, Mark (Charlie Tahan of Ozark, who will reunite with Carter in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown), has overcome problems with addiction but maintains a slippery relationship with the truth, to the chagrin of his therapist (Geoffrey Owens).

Wanda’s ex-husband, Henry (Bradley Whitford), has his hands full with a new brood of kids and is a bit of a whining kid himself. Her mild-mannered boyfriend, Marshall, played with unexpected restraint by Michael Rapaport, is in the quiet grip of some sort of existential angst. He blurts out a non sequitur marriage proposal and then, in the next breath, rescinds it, embarrassed that he’s overstepped. Even if she weren’t cheating on Marshall, having recently discovered her Sapphic side, marrying him would be the last thing on Wanda’s list of goals. If she had one.

Her relationship with young college professor Sophie (Sepideh Moafi, of Black Bird and The Killing of Two Lovers) is a secret, but not one that she’s guarding too closely. Henry’s and Sarah’s responses to the revelation are sharply written and played, but more to the point is Wanda’s dawning realization that the romance isn’t all that. Sophie, who excels at compartmentalizing, tends to show up on Wanda’s front porch at odd hours, sometimes drunk and always horny.

And then there’s Wanda’s new friendship with Albert (Michael Beach), a high school classmate who recently returned to town. Though his being a firefighter and a devoted divorced dad might be a too-easy shorthand for earnest, solid goodness, there’s also something fresh and winning in the way he’s both flustered and impressed when Wanda mentions her bisexual dating status.

Working from a screenplay by Jim Beggarly (A Country Called Home, A Year and Change), Walsh struggles in the early going to strike the desired tone between dark comedy and something more anodyne — even with Falco and Berlin at the center of the opening sequence, which revolves around 68-year-old Grace (Berlin) receiving a cancer diagnosis that’s better than the one she expected. The gallows humor feels strained, and the insistent chirpiness of James Righton’s score is too much. Things settle down and find their footing with Tahan’s first scene, which provides a jolt of more complicated humor.

Responding to various SOS messages from Grace, Sarah and Mark at all hours, Wanda is always on call; the movie’s title expresses an emotional refrain. At the helm of her blue station wagon, she spends good portions of her days crisscrossing town to provide comfort and rescue. It’s at night that she does her work as a bookkeeper. The scenes of her doing the books at bars and restaurants in the small downtown are alive with something workaday yet unexpected, captured with vibrancy in Aaron Medick’s camerawork, while Righton’s score takes on an angsty and effective undertow. (Elsewhere it hits pitch-perfect comic notes.) There’s family quality time, too, captured in scenes at a local ice cream place, where three generations of women talk about, or around, what’s going on. Or what went on decades earlier.

It would be an exaggeration to call this feature an actors’ showcase, but it’s certainly an actors’ movie, which might explain the involvement as exec producers of Falco and Jesse Eisenberg (who appeared in Free Samples, Beggarly’s first produced screenplay). In addition to Wanda’s interactions with other characters — complete with eye-rolls and precision application of the skeptical raised eyebrow — Falco finds the subtle edge in a couple of breakthrough breakdowns, with Rapaport and Berlin each providing the perfect counterbalance. Falco and Whitford are spot-on in the choice scenes they share, effortlessly slipping into the well-worn grooves and rhythms of their characters’ animosity.

Carter and Tahan lend nuance to their more broadly written roles, while Berlin keeps you hooked with everything about her — not least the syncopated rhythms of her line readings, especially when the lines have built-in snap. “It’s not gambling,” the casino habitué tells her daughter, “if you know how to play.”

Falco, involving as ever, might not be engaged in a wild gamble here, but there’s a certain risk in the ways that she and the movie circle a neat conclusion. And there’s wisdom in the way they wind up somewhere far messier, sweeter and more satisfying.

Collaboration among L.A.’s top art institutions reached new heights Monday as the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art announced the joint ownership and management of a collection of 260 works of art gifted by philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn.

The collection — consisting entirely of works by L.A.-based artists — has been accumulated by the Mohns over the last two decades and is being called the Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA, or MAC3. The gift is accompanied by a $15-million to $20-million endowment for future acquisitions and is designed for annual growth. It also covers expenses incurred for storage and care of the art.

“I don’t want it to be a burden,” Jarl Mohn told The Times about his decision to pair MAC3 with an endowment. “I want this to be a really joyful experience and not a heavy lift for the institutions.”

Mohn said the endowment is larger than “all the things I’ve supported at all the art institutions in L.A., in the aggregate over the last 20 years.”

Mohn added that he wasn’t sure of the market value of the MAC3 collection, which was in the process of being appraised. He expected to know within the next four months.

The Hammer is augmenting the MAC3 collection with 80 works it has collected over the 12 years it has been staging its “Made in L.A.” biennials. An additional 16 pieces have been added to the collection from “Made in L.A. 2023” by curators from all three museums — for a total of 356 paintings, sculptures and mixed media works.

Mohn recounted walking through the Hammer at the end of last year’s “Made in L.A.” with its director, Ann Philbin, along with LACMA and MOCA Directors Michael Govan and Johanna Burton, respectively, and their chief curators.

“And then we sat in a conference room, we had lunch, we talked for three hours and we voted,” Mohn said.

Curators from each museum will jointly decide what to acquire each year going forward — with the sole stipulations being that the works be by L.A. artists and that every other year, acquisitions will be culled from future “Made in L.A.” biennials. Each institution will have access to the full collection for display, and arrangements will be made for the collection to be lent to museums globally — with financial aid offered to small institutions without the means to support such a program.

The MAC3 collection currently includes work by Lauren Halsey, rafa esparza, Aria Dean, Karon Davis, Martine Syms, Mark Grotjahn, Silke Otto-Knapp, Rodney McMillian, Analia Saban, Cauleen Smith, Luchita Hurtado and Kandis Williams. One of MAC3’s goals is to entice other collectors to donate additional works, creating an ongoing commitment to L.A. artists and the city’s art ecosystem.

Mohn said this collection has been decades in the making.

“I decided to build a collection around emerging L.A. artists because we’re all lucky that we live in a place like this where there’s something happening,” he said. “It’s like being in New York when the Abstract Expressionist movement was happening or in Paris around the turn of the century with the advent of Cubism.”

The idea for MAC3 fell into place over the last 18 months, Mohn said. He considers L.A.’s art scene to be remarkably harmonious, and he noted that all three museum directors quickly supported the idea. He doesn’t foresee a scenario in which the museums find themselves competing for the collection but rather envisions a future where all three institutions feature a few pieces in various shows according to theme. Govan, for example, has requested access to a particular piece intended to occupy a prime spot when the new David Geffen Galleries open at LACMA.

“I said, ‘Great, we’ll put it in the collection, but it’ll be for everybody,’” Mohn said of Govan’s request. “‘But this is something you wanted first, so you got first dibs on it,’ but [the museums] have been so collaborative and so cooperative, working with each other … it really is exactly as I had envisioned it would go.”

MAC3 is in line with the collaborative ethos espoused by major L.A. institutions, which have long worked together on citywide art festivals and projects, including the Getty’s massive “PST Art,” which opens next month with dozens of exhibits and programs scheduled for museums and public spaces across Southern California. Govan also has talked often about his goal of implementing a “strategic plan of regional partnerships” with museums throughout the area in order to better showcase LACMA’s vast collection.

The Mohns have a history of boosting local art and artists. They have provided significant financial support for “Made in L.A.” since its 2012 inauguration. They also support three awards given to L.A. artists — the Mohn Award, the Career Achievement Award and the Public Recognition Award. They have contributed financially to institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Brick; and Los Angeles Nomadic Division.