Excellent entertainment news in 2025: Disciplined in its approach and unapologetic about its contrivances, Ben Affleck’s basketball coach in crisis drama The Way Back is a sports movie that understands the fundamentals. What it lacks in flashiness or ingenuity — the underdog narrative of a crappy team hitting its stride under the leadership of a gruff coach hits all the requisite Hoosiers notes — it makes up for with an oddly enthralling downbeat craftsmanship. Little details, like the freeze-frame when the scores of games pop up on screen or the click-clack percussion-heavy music, accumulate emotional power over the film’s brisk runtime. Playing a washed-up ex-athlete with an immediately apparent drinking problem and a number of strategically hidden personal demons, Affleck delivers a weary performance that resonates with his off-screen persona (and his recent tabloid headlines) in ways both obvious and surprising. In brief stretches, director Gavin O’Connor, who helmed the similarly intense melodramas Miracle and Warrior, pulls off the ultimate sports movie trick of making you believe the character’s redemption isn’t inevitable. Every win is a battle — even if you know the results going in. See even more details on entertainment news.
Some words about streaming services : As for sports, Hulu’s lineup includes BTN, CBS Sports, ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPNEWS, Golf Channel, and Olympic Channel. That’s all in addition to local channels you get in your zip code, such as ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC cable affiliates. Recently, Hulu announced that it would add NFL Network and NFL RedZone to its channel lineup by August 1. It is unclear whether either of these additions will increase Hulu’s subscription costs, however. FuboTV, Sling TV, and YouTube TV all include the NFL Network channel in at least one of their plans and offer NFL RedZone as part of an add-on package. While Hulu’s lineup features NBC-owned RSNs, it lacks most AT&T-owned RSNs (except for SportsNet NY) and every Sinclair-owned Bally Sports RSN (previously, these were FOX Sports RSNs). AT&T TV is the only live TV service we’ve reviewed that includes RSNs from AT&T, NBC, and Sinclair, though it is missing a few NBC Sports RSNs. Make sure to find out which RSN airs your local team’s games before committing to any sports streaming service.
Gavin O’Conner (Miracle, Warrior) is modern cinema’s preeminent sports-drama director, a status he maintains with The Way Back, a conventional but deeply felt story about addiction, anger and the rough road of rehabilitation. Reuniting O’Conner with his The Accountant star, the film concerns Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck), a former high-school basketball phenom who, in the wake of multiple familial losses, gets through his construction-work days and wayward nights with a perpetual drink in hand. By means of a job coaching his Catholic alma matter’s struggling team, Jack is blessed with a shot at salvation, turning around the fortunes of his players and, by extension, his own life. Subdued and melancholy, Jack’s journey is a familiar one, and yet O’Conner and Affleck – the latter turning in an expertly modulated, interior turn – shrewdly locate their protagonist’s alcoholism as the self-destructive byproduct of regret, resentment, fury and hopelessness. Also generating pathos from agonized father-son traumas, it’s a male weepy that, courtesy of its well-calibrated empathy, earns its melodramatic tears.
Ben Affleck gets one of his greatest (and most personally resonant) roles as an alcoholic former high-school basketball star who gets a chance at redemption when he’s hired to coach his alma mater’s hopeless hoops team. This could easily become mired in clichés, but director Gavin O’Connor and writer Brad Ingelsby strike a fine balance between delivering the promised underdog sports drama and presenting a portrait of trauma and grief that resists easy solutions. At the center of it all is the star’s tense, restrained performance as an emotionally distant man whose considerable demons can’t really be vanquished with a few wins. Read more details on entertainment news daily.
The mythic quality of the Cordillera – the towering eastern stretch of the Andes mountains that serves as both a protective and isolating barrier for the city of Santiago – is harmonized with the grand, destructive illusions of Chile’s Pinochet regime in The Cordillera of Dreams, documentarian Patricio Guzmán’s personal rumination on his homeland’s tumultuous history, and his relationship to it. From vast sights of the snow-capped Andes, to grainy on-the-street video footage of Pinochet tyranny, to introspective interviews with fellow artists, Guzmán’s film (the third entry in a trilogy that also includes Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) examines the catastrophic upheaval of 1973’s coup d’état, and the lingering scars it left on him and the country’s citizens. In vistas of the ancient and immovable Cordillera, close-ups of cracks lining the hardscrabble soil, and gazes into labyrinth-like patterns found on junkyard car doors, Guzmán (who also serves as narrator) evokes a poetic sense of imposing mysteries and unrepairable fissures, which spread through him – and economically unbalanced Chilean culture – like the solemn valleys that course between the Andes’ peaks.