It Ain't Over

At the 2015 All-Star Game in Cincinnati, fans picked baseball's four greatest living players: Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays. Yogi Berra, following the ceremony from the stands with his granddaughter, wasn't among them. That snub is where 'It Ain't Over' starts, the documentary written and directed by Sean Mullin that premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June 2022 to argue for what Berra did on the field.

The numbers carry much of the case. Ten World Series rings, three Most Valuable Player awards and eighteen All-Star Game appearances, plus the only perfect game in World Series history, Don Larsen's in 1956, which Berra called from behind the plate without the pitcher shaking off a single sign. Mullin lets the archive footage and the statistics speak rather than the caricature.

His granddaughter Lindsay Berra guides the story, sitting down with the family and with the men who played beside him or for him. Out of that comes the son of Italian immigrants raised on The Hill in St. Louis; the sailor wounded off Normandy on D-Day aboard a rocket boat who, as the film tells it, never put in for a Purple Heart because he didn't want to worry his mother; the husband who kept writing to Carmen across sixty-five years of marriage; and the father who faced down his son Dale's cocaine addiction.

There's room as well for the cartoon bear everybody connected him to, 'Yogi Bear', and for the Yogi-isms, the twisted little sayings that ended up weighing more than his career. Derek Jeter, Joe Torre, Bob Costas, Billy Crystal and Roger Angell each take a turn in front of the camera, as does Vin Scully in one of his final interviews before his death in 2022.

Sony Pictures Classics bought worldwide rights after Tribeca and opened the film in US cinemas on 12 May 2023, where it took $705,355. It won the audience award at the Nantucket Film Festival, and went on to a Writers Guild of America nomination for documentary screenplay and two Critics Choice Documentary nominations, for best archival documentary and best sports documentary. The thirteen outlets collected on Movienco leave it just short of 80 out of 100.

• Documentary
• Biography
• Sports