Friday Night Lights
Bissinger followed the team for the entire 1988 season. However, the book also has a number of secondary political and social issues existing in Odessa, all of which share ties to the Permian Panthers football team. These include socioeconomic disparity, racism, segregation (and desegregation), and poverty.
10 January 1980, Galveston, Texas, USA
18 May 1949, Houston, Texas, USA
5 August 1964, Chicago, Illinois, USA
May 23, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, USA
27 July 1978, Andrews, West Texas, USA
8 April 1953, Los Angeles, California, USA
29 November 1982, Speake, Alabama, USA
6 March 1955, Sweetwater, Tennessee, USA
29 June 1986, Austin, Texas, USA
25 February 1980, Longview, Texas, USA
October 30, 2009
What Friday Night Lights offers is the perspective that, for the people and young players caught up in this whirlwind, football simultaneously means everything and ultimately nothing.March 26, 2007
A heart-pounding big-screen treatment that captures all the action of a tumultuous season while showing the emotional toll on the players.October 12, 2004
Friday Night Lights is the real deal, a grim, in-your-face expose of one West Texas school's fanatical sports program.February 02, 2009
Friday Night Lights is a feel-good movie, but it's not real. It's a hard-hitting Hallmark greeting card. It's no wonder it appealed to Larry King %u2014 it's safe, easy, conventional, and feigns incisiveness.June 03, 2016
It succeeds best as a sadly iconic portrayal of America's love affair with Texas high school football.November 01, 2007
Few films have shown so powerfully the slashing double edge of sports fever.June 24, 2006
The affecting, gruelling result is less a document of recreational sport than one of obligation and ordeal.December 24, 2010
So much more than a football movie.April 14, 2007
The script spends at least as much time exploring the psychologies of the young players and the problems they face at home as it does rallying the audience behind their efforts on the field.October 19, 2004
Substitutes slick, cynical point-scoring for insight.July 31, 2008
Had Billy Bob Thornton not been so good in so many films, people would be talking about this as his greatest role.November 11, 2004
Nuance typifies both Mr. Thornton's highly calibrated performance and the film's absence of unnecessary underlining.