Love & Basketball

Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, Love & Basketball follows Sanaa Lathan’s Monica and Omar Epps’ Quincy as they navigate their complicated relationship through the ups and downs of their respective basketball careers. Filmmaker Prince-Bythewood, working from her own screenplay, delivers a slow-moving yet pervasively entertaining drama that benefits from the superb efforts of its actors, and while Epps is as charismatic and engaging here as anticipated, Lathan’s star-making turn as the complex protagonist remains a highlight and anchors the proceedings through its less-than-spellbinding stretches. (It’s clear, as well, that Prince-Bythewood effectively elicits top-notch work from periphery players like Dennis Haysbert and Alfre Woodard.) The mostly absorbing atmosphere is enhanced and heightened by Prince-Bythewood’s unabashed embrace of several melodramatic, Douglas Sirk-like plot points and digressions, with, ironically enough, the picture at its least interesting when focused on the basketball-related exploits of its exceedingly agreeable central characters (ie such moments are, generally speaking, hardly as riveting as Prince-Bythewood has obviously intended). By the time the satisfying finale rolls around, Love & Basketball, though saddled with an often palpably overlong running time, has cemented its place as a thoroughly watchable endeavor that does, on top of everything else, boast an appealingly epic sensibility.

*** out of ****