SILVER

Two recreational baseball teams, the Riverdogs and Adler's Paint, have been meeting on their New England field on Sunday afternoons for longer than anyone can remember. These middle-aged sportsmen can't run as fast as they used to or connect as reliably with a pitch, but their vigorous appetite for socializing, squabbling and busting chops remains undiminished. After the know-nothing county board opts to raze the baseball diamond to make way for a school, the teams meet for one final game at their beloved Soldier's Field, with girlfriends, kids and local hooligans as intermittent spectators. As day turns to night and innings bleed together, the players face the uncertainty of a new era. Lovingly laid in a vanished Massachusetts of the mid-1990s, Carson Lund's poignant feature debut plays like a lazy afternoon, perfectly attuned to the rhythms of America's eternal pastime. Named for a rarely deployed pitch, EEPHUS is both a comedy for the baseball connoisseur and a movie for anyone who has ever lamented their community slipping away — an unconventional but welcome addition to America's ever-growing canon of beloved baseball movies. DIR/SCR/PROD Carson Lund; SCR Nate Fisher; SCR/PROD Michael Basta; PROD David Entin, Tyler Taormina. U.S., 2024, color, 99 min. NOT RATED