Worth seeing for the face-reddening, throat-constricting, vein-popping performance of Nick Nolte as a college basketball coach fashioned after Indiana U.'s Bobby Knight (who appears as himself in the climactic game, opposite Nolte on the sideline). At any rate he is fashioned after Knight up until he forges a Faustian pact with an alumni booster and accomplished money launderer (J.T. Walsh), who is photographed with the sort of horrification -- jack-o'lantern closeups, low angles, tilted camera -- that Eisenstein reserved for czarist fat cats. The on-court action and coaching sessions, utilizing such advanced -- yet still passably young -- students of the game as Shaquille O'Neal, Anfernee Hardaway, Matt Nover, Bobby Hurley, et al., has an in-the-thick-of-it authenticity. Though, with William Friedkin's hand-held camerawork and rapid-fire montages, it lacks a little something in drama: a little something in development and strategy and what TV analysts refer to as "game situations." It lacks, in short, all the things that make a good basketball game into a richer aesthetic experience than most movies. Mary McDonnell, Ed O'Neill, Bob Cousy, Larry Bird. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd