Unsurprising, perhaps, that a film marketed for its fleeting perversions is, all told, a simple love story between two men. A Dangerous Method is one prom night away from Freud and Jung: The College Years, naively capturing the formation of modern psychotherapy amid the burgeoning friendship of its architects.

Keira Knightley’s role in all this has been, if not exactly oversold, then certainly mischaracterised. Sabrina Spielrein is a profoundly troubled young woman. Knightley imbues her with violent tics that would have you believe a dislocated jaw, so distended is its appearance. Upon her arrival in a Zurich hospital, she is cared for by Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), a psychiatrist with a keen interest in the virgin field of so-called talking therapies. Their sessions – akin to more modern practices in all but formality – are witness to Jung slowly unpeeling a childhood beset not just by violence, but the torment of her having enjoyed it.

It is clear how David Cronenberg’s film could be confused with a more sordid exploration; likened to a yesteryear Secretary, perhaps. Yet far more profound than its brief moments of masochistic punctuation are the scenes between Jung and Sigmund Freud: his friend, confessor and rival. Their relationship spans several years, and shifts with time. In the beginning, they relate as eager mentor and student, untroubled by discussions lasting 13 hours without pause. Despite his own theories oftentimes being dismissed as spurious, Jung quickly found Freud – already in his 50s by the time of their meeting – an altogether more intoxicating prospect than he had bargained for. He would later caution a friend that “he’s so persuasive; so convincing. He makes you feel you should abandon your own ideas and simply follow in his wake”.

Spielrein is not the third point of a love triangle. Instead, her function is as a point of divergence for the two men. In finally relenting to his patient’s sexual frenzy, Jung is humiliated; scolded for his childish indiscretion. Relations sour further when Freud learns of his friend’s expanding interest in the occult: in the mystical voodoo of tarot and the supernatural. Such fascinations seemed evidence of an intellect in disarray, unable to reconcile its primal drives with an otherwise ordered and idealised life. It was to be a fracture that manifested not only in Jung’s crumbling relations with Spielrein and Freud, but in that of his wife, Emma, and Otto Gross: a confidante whose own ideas on sexual morality would ultimately give rise to those very perversions.

Two titans of philosophy, given body by compelling performances. Fassbender, to whom cinema seemingly owes an entire year of box-office receipts, is the embodiment of denial in a role that sees his intellectualism transformed into paralyzing guilt. He certainly has the face for it. As depicted, Freud is more austere than popular perception would have it, and little room is found for his infamous drug habit. Vigo Mortisson succeeds his deranged turn in Eastern Promises by disappearing into our most famous of thinkers, not by means of prosthetic, but in adopting a rigidly disciplined manner wholly removed from his own.

These characters employ learned gamesmanship in a headfirst dive into the pool of repression. Nonetheless, at a brisk 90 minutes, A Dangerous Method is terminably sleight. Were it not for the weight of Fassbender and Mortensen’s respective performances, the film could easily have collapsed into pompous melodrama. Thankfully, it consistently punches above its weight. Here is the picturesque origin story of a now widely-practiced field. It was not always thus. “Columbus had no idea what country he’d discovered. Like him, I’m in the dark”, Freud conceded. “All I know is I’ve set foot on the shore and the country exists”.

Moneyball – a smart movie by any standard – got me thinking: in a negotiation, be it for coaches or CEOs, why does one side always insist on writing their offer down on a piece of paper, before sliding it across the table for their opposite number to unfold and read? What could possibly be on there that couldn’t be said just as well out loud? It happens all the time, and no one seems to know why.

That’s a metaphor for baseball, in a way: a game that grew into a billion dollar industry almost entirely by chance. Naturally, there’s some received wisdom about who to put where, thanks in part to the many talent scouts that sprung up around the game – tobacco types who make like they know how to pick ‘em, when it’s really just guess work. They used to sign these young kids right out of college on the promise of a shot at the big leagues. You never heard about the ones who didn’t make it, because there was always a dozen more waiting in line. We’re a century in, and not one of them can tell you why any of it does or doesn’t work.

In 2001, the Oakland Athletics lost a playoff game to the New York Yankees. They fought hard, but there remained a perception that teams like Oakland were little more than training academies for the bigger sides, who’d swoop in post-season to cherry pick the best players for themselves. Manager Billy Beane had been watching it happen for years. He assembled his scouts and asked what could be done. Just like they always had, they began pitching talent from their bound summer reports. It was a familiar roll call: good, established names with good reasons why they ought to work. Beane has heard it before and didn’t care to hear it again. “You’re not even looking at the problem. We’ve got to think differently. If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there.”

He found few friends at that table, but Peter Brand understood. He had an economics degree from Yale and had never pitched a ball in his life, but that was okay: he knew about statistics and what they meant for the game. The way he saw it, scouting was fundamentally flawed. Those guys saw players as a strange bundle of reputation and hearsay, tied together by what they liked to call intuition: the unquantifiable feel they had for a player. Brand cared about just one thing: on-base percentage. It wasn’t the stuff Barry Bonds made a career out of, but it came cheap and paid well. When you throw out everything you’ve been told about age, stature or experience, you wind up with a list of guys undervalued by every metric that counts.

Moneyball isn’t just one eureka moment, it’s five eureka moments strung together into a winning baseball team. Brad Pitt might not haul logs up any snow-covered mountains, but he pushes back against an entrenched wisdom that says his revolution can’t succeed. Everyone thinks they know best. Billy Beane has a backroom staffed in the ways that don’t work anymore, and their jobs depend on them not seeing it. Watch this 25-year-old tell a room full of greybeards they’ve wasted the last 30 years of their careers on the baseball equivalent of joo joo. Look at their faces.

What’s refreshing about Moneyball is the lack of hubris. No one is less enamoured with glory than Beane, who twice laments “if we don’t win the last game of the Series, they’ll dismiss us. And everything we’ve done here, none of it’ll matter”. The mark of a great sports movie is whether a newcomer can still make sense of it, and Moneyball effortlessly distills its complex equations into dramatic scenes. The Social Network had that same quality. It is no coincidence that Aaron Sorkin worked on both, and while his work here is limited to a rewrite, his sense of occasion remains. Moneyball is no less than a complete reappraisal of how sports movies are made. It does for the genre what its subject did for baseball, and soon everyone will be picking it apart to figure out how it works.