‘The Damned United’

Don’t panic, don’t touch that dial, but for the second week in a row (after the fine LeBron James documentary “More Than a Game”) I’m pounding the drum for a sports film. But as written by the always entertaining Peter Morgan, responsible for “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon,” “The Damned United” is considerably more than a sports film. Starring the top-flight quartet of Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney and Jim Broadbent, this is a motion picture about ambition, betrayal and moral blindness, the tale of a complicated, driven, gifted man (who happens to be a professional soccer coach) whose flaws are so striking they flirt with raising his story to the level of tragedy.

-- Kenneth Turan