MOVIES . . . COBB

This movie on the life of baseball great Ty Cobb -- who once held 40 major league hitting and base-running records and whose lifetime batting average of .367 is still unsurpassed -- is not about baseball. It's about a venomous, wife-beating racist who saw himself as a genius. TIME movie critic Richard Schickel says some filmgoers may think this is a "messy movie, sometimes repetitive, sometimes too compressed and allusive." Still he says this is "irrelevant in comparison to the horrific fascination of his story."

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