In the arena of the sports movie, every story can be told. The impossible underdog team that survives a brutal season into the final game. The kid who’s just starting out and the veteran being pulled back into the game, who both share the same odds: Against. Stories of the power of coming together as a selfless team, and myths of individual strength when you remove all the limits. Sports movies make us cheer, laugh, cry, and scream. They even make us think about renewing that gym membership.
We’re going all the way to the end zone with our list of the 150 Best Sports Movies of All Time, sorted by Adjusted Tomatometer from at least 20 reviews each. (The Adjusted Tomatometer is our special formula which takes into account, among other factors, the movie’s year of release and its number of reviews.) Just about every sport ever played is here: football (Rudy), baseball (Bull Durham), hockey (Miracle), soccer (Bend It Like Beckham), boxing (Rocky), ice skating (I, Tonya). There’s racing: by foot (Without Limits), by car (Talladega Nights), by horse (Seabiscuit). We got fictional sports (Rollerball) and sports we made up through sheer tyranny of will (Murderball). If it’s in the spirit of competition, it’s in this list.
Because this is a movie list, there are no TV movies (we pour one out for Brian’s Song), and nothing rated Rotten — even fan favorites like Any Given Sunday. Please deal with your rage accordingly before continuing.
And with our most recent updates, we welcome in new popular hits like Ben Affleck’s The Way Back, Best Picture nominee Ford v Ferrari, wrestling family drama Fighting With My Family, the vertigo-inducing Free Solo, and Maiden, about the first all-woman crew in a global yacht race.
Ready? For the leisure, life, and love of the game, here are the 150 Best Sports Movies of All Time!
(Photo by Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox Film Corp, TriStar/Courtesy Everett Collection)
We’ve put together the ultimate starting lineup of inspiring sports movies! In no time, you’ll be riding horses, climbing rocks, driving powerful race cars, bolting cross-country, and coaching underdog teams to miraculous victory.
Or they’ll at least get you off the couch.
Some of the most esteemed Certified Fresh inspirational sports movies take on MMA (Warrior), boxing (Creed, Cinderella Man), auto-racing (Rush, Senna), basketball (Hoosiers, He Got Game), hockey (Miracle, Goon). Of course, not everything that glitters is strictly critics’ gold. Which is why we included movies like The Cutting Edge, Stick It, or Lords of Dogtown: They may be lower on the Tomatometer, but they’re high on electric inspiration.
Read on for our recommendations of the most inspiring sports movies of all time! (And you can find them all in Vudu’s inspiring sports movies collection, with most on sale!)
It’s Friday, there’s a new raft of movies in the UK cinemas this week, but are any of them any good? This week the UK film hacks give us their opinions on Clint Eastwood‘s latest directorial film starring Angelina Jolie, Changeling. Also out this week is Hollywood satire What Just Happened, and an early Christmas present in the shape of a festive flick starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon in Four Christmases. So what did the critics think?
Based on a true story, Changeling stars Angelina Jolie as an overworked single mother who fights for the truth following the disappearance of her son, and is ably directed by veteran cowpoke Clint Eastwood. At a – just-below-Fresh – 59% on the Tomatometer, Changeling doesn’t have the pedigree of previous Eastwood outings, but most critics agree that Angelina Jolie’s assured performance has Oscar-bait written all over it. If we were just counting the UK critics responses the film would stand at a much healthier 83% on the Tomatometer, which just goes to show the difference in tastes on either side of the Atlantic.
What Just Happened is a Hollywood satire starring Robert De Niro as an outrageous movie producer, and is based on the real life memoirs of Art Linson, who also adapted his book for the big screen. Most critics agreed that De Niro is on fine form, following the disastrous Righteous Kill (21% on the Tomatometer), who puts in a classic performance as the back stabbing producer. But old Bobby can’t do enough to save What Just Happened from the ignominy of a Rotten 53% rating on the Tomatometer. Critics accuse the film of lacking the necessary satirical bite needed to do the source material justice, with many suggesting that the film has fallen prey to the Hollywood practices and foibles that the film itself seeks to criticise.
Vince Vaughn stars in his second festive holiday vehicle, after the dismal Fred Claus of Christmas 2007 (21% on the Tomatometer), alongside Reese Witherspoon in Four Christmases. Helmed by the director of the highly-praised but little-seen documentary King Of Kong (97%), Seth Gordon, hopes were high for Four Christmases, but unfortunately at 26% on the Tomatometer, it’s more of a Turkey than a Christmas pudding. The UK scribes have criticised the lack of Christmas cheer, the miscasting of the two principle actors and the horrific waste of a fine supporting cast. Christmas comes earlier every year, Four Christmases probably shouldn’t have come at all.
Quote Of The Week
” “Hang on lads, I’ve got a great idea…” said Michael Caine at the end of The Italian Job. Presumably he didn’t mean waiting 40 years before pulling off a caper that wouldn’t blow the bloody doors off a rabbit hutch.”
Flawless. Elliot Noble, Sky Movies.
One documentary from the US last year spoke to avid videogamers more than any other, and in the process told a brilliantly human story about good, evil and Donkey Kong. In this week’s Further Reading, Kim Newman celebrates The King of Kong.
This is the most exciting, audience-involving film of any kind I’ve seen this year. At none of the previews of the summer’s blockbusters was I part of such a vocal, enthusiastic and wholly-gripped crowd as I was at a relatively small screening of a picture which has made its UK debut as a DVD retail item.
The King of Kong is an aptly ragged-looking documentary which takes a completely uninviting subject — a controversy in the world of retro-computer gaming about whether longtime Donkey Kong champion Billy Mitchell should cede his title to contender Steve Weibe — and makes it the stuff of legends. Donkey Kong, for those who don’t remember, is (or, rather, was) an early, fiendishly difficult game from the Super Mario Bros stable, in which the plumber tries to ascend various ladders to rescue a princess, while avoiding missiles tossed by a malign ape. From the DVD extras, I learned that the game was originally supposed to feature Popeye, Olive Oyl and Bluto, but the Japanese designers couldn’t get the rights to the characters and came up with their own.
Billy Mitchell, hailed as ‘the gamer of the century’, is a reptilian, faux-cool smarm-bucket who invokes fanatical loyalty from longtime rivals and associates, including Brian Kuh (the third-highest DK scorer), who scuttles around with Renfield-like devotion to his master, and Walter Day, the bizarre Roberts Blossom lookalike who has taken on the mantle of definitive judge for the field (an accolade confirmed when he strikes an alliance with the Guinness Book of Records).
Though a patriot, a family man, a successful hot sauce tycoon and rated as ultra-cool by his circle, the goateed and distinctively coiffed Mitchell comes across onscreen as a classic villain. Even his closest friends call him devious, but he is also tragically puffed up in his idea of celebrity, flirting with the interviewer and referring to himself in the third person as if he were a world leader planning a counter-coup rather than a probable saddo whose highest achievement (a perfect Pac-Man score) means less and less with every passing minute.
Wiebe, by contrast, is a classic underdog: following a run of near-miss careers in baseball and music, he took up the game after being laid off, then reinvented himself as a science teacher loved by his students. Crucially, in this showing at least, he doesn’t even seem to think that much of his knack for DK, though he is clearly as obsessively devoted to chasing the record as Mitchell is to keeping it.
Director Seth Gordon intended a more general inside-retro-gaming documentary but lucked into an astonishingly potent storyline and must have sorted through acres of footage to get stuff this good. So good, in fact, a dramatised remake is reportedly in the works. It has vivid supporting characters, including Roy Schild (aka ‘Mr Awesome’), a secondary ‘evil mastermind’ in Wiebe’s camp and Wiebe’s amazing children (a young son who shouts ‘stop playing Donkey Kong‘ as Dad is on his first record-breaking attempt, a tweenage daughter who wryly observes that a lot of people ruin their lives trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records).
You also get as many ups and downs as a sports fiction film, with the added plus that since it’s a true story the outcome isn’t decreed by cliché — though there are triumphs and disasters near the end, the story goes on and you can’t stop yourself looking up on the internet to find out who reigns as the current King of Kong. Everyone, including the near-saintly but not sanctimonious Wiebe, reveals more about themselves than the average reality TV contestant would, with many jaw-dropping statements about epochal achievements and grand calamities that took place in a world of game-playing marginalised by the end of the 1980s.
Mitchell and cohorts act in such a way that, even if it turned out Gordon manipulated and edited the hell out of the footage, it would be impossible for your conclusions about these people not to be — to some extent – horribly true. When Wiebe sends in a tape of his first record-breaking score, Day has agents talk their way into his house to assess his personal DK machine to see if it’s been tampered with, Mitchell claims only scores achieved in public count and the record doesn’t go into the books. When Wiebe does it again at a games convention, Mitchell has protégé Doris Self (an 80-year-old Q*Bert whizz) hand over a blurry, splicey tape in which he purportedly sets a higher record which Day and company accept within ten minutes.
I don’t see how this incident could be spun in a way which doesn’t suggest the tiny sub-culture was stacked against the outsider, though there’s a subtle thread later in the film, which I suspect comes from a dawning awareness of what they look like on the record, as Day and his crowd (except the loyal Kuh) begin to feel the long-time champion has been less than honest with them and respond to Wiebe’s essential decency even as they consistently mispronounce his name.
There’s a stunning moment when the antagonists almost meet, for the only time in the film, as Wiebe is openly friendly to Mitchell, who cruises by ignoring him at a games machine while making a snide remark to his wife; it may be that when the cameras weren’t on them, these men have played each other or treated each other courteously, but the audience I saw it with hissed a pantomime villain and cheered for the decent contender. Even Mitchell’s obviously genuine decency towards Doris, a little old lady whose gaming career he enabled and championed, doesn’t take the sting out of his Dick Dastardly act elsewhere.
It makes good use of 1980s inspirational pop music, and — like the best of these ‘American weirdo’ documentaries (American Movie, Spellbound) — works up a vein of melancholy sympathy for folks who fanatically and unselfconsciously pursue goals that seem absurd. The middle-aged guy dressed like a teenager who wistfully remembers thinking that the guys who racked up big arcade scores would have hot babes clustering about them perfectly encapsulates the delusional, funny-sad heroism of the world of Kong.
Good documentaries can be made about significant subjects, like the recent Iraq/torture-themed Standard Operating Procedure and Taxi to the Dark Side, but sometimes outstanding true life films spin gold out of ostensibly ridiculous, trivial material.
There’s a veritable buffet of new releases for the discerning cinematic connoisseur this week, ranging from a highly acclaimed battle for joystick supremacy (The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters) to a not-so-highly acclaimed science fiction return of body snatchers (The Invasion). Read on, because there’s so much more!
Tomatometer: 96%
One of last year’s best-reviewed films, The King of Kong — bought a year ago at the Slamdance Film Festival, soon to be adapted into a feature film by New Line — brings us up close and personal with the often hilarious real-life rivalry between two Donkey Kong champs. Hey, some people watch NASCAR; others watch grown men rack up record scores by jumping over barrels. Critics loved the film, full of humor and compelling drama, and the DVD release is chock-full of extras for fans of the Donkey Kong arcade game, its history, and the film’s stars themselves.
Tomatometer: 19%
Some say the classic science fiction chiller Invasion of the Body Snatchers needed no twenty-first century update; after watching Oliver Hirshbiegel‘s The Invasion, most critics agreed. The Nicole Kidman–Daniel Craig vehicle, about a worldwide epidemic that turns people into creepily calm drones (who employ a disgusting means of inoculation-via-projectile vomit), seems to have gleaned no benefit from infamous story tweakings and reshoots by the Wachowski brothers and James McTeague. Besides a few standard featurettes, the bonus menu is acutely devoid of any presence by Hirshbiegel or his stars.
Hannah Montana: One in a Million
Tomatometer: N/A
Oh, that Miley Cyrus. The daughter of Billy Ray stepped confidently into the shoes of her teen queen predecessors — wholesome former power tweens like Mary Kate, Ashley, and Hilary — to assume complete and total power over the hearts and minds of the Disney set. As Miley Stewart, a pop princess who moonlights under the stage name Hannah Montana, Cyrus injects humor and real-life celebrity sensibility into her series; soon we’ll be treated to the Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds concert documentary in 3D. But for now, indulge in the week’s guiltiest pleasure.
Tomatometer: N/A
As a wise man once said, “[They] are the Aqua Teens, make the homeys say ho and the girlies want to scream” — and if you’re familiar with the Adult Swim fave about a trio of walking, talking snack food products living in Jersey, then you should already be out the door to pick up the latest collection of episodes from Season Four. With guest stars like Andrew W.K. and Tera Patrick, new characters like Meatwad’s dog Handbanana, and a predictably awesome set of DVD extras (including “Aqua Teen Respond to the Critics” and “Granny Takes Her Top Off”), this one is a must-buy for you sophisticated types.
Tomatometer: 74%
Rivalry ran deep in the seedy underbelly of 1970s New York City, but especially so with drug kingpin Nicky Barnes and his competitor, Frank Lucas. Curiously, the antagonism continued long after both went to prison and turned state’s evidence; Lucas’ story, adapted into Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster, and Mr. Untouchable, Marc Levin’s documentary based on Barnes’ own memoirs, opened in theaters only a week apart. And as hip-hop mogul Damon Dash produced the Barnes doc, his former Roc-A-Fella Records partner Jay-Z recorded an album of songs inspired by the Lucas biopic. But both films also garnered the praise of critics, so if you enjoyed the Hollywood treatment, now give the documentary a shot.
Tomatometer: 100%
A crumbling apartment complex in Cairo is the setting for this melodramatic, sprawling meditation on current socio-economic politics in the region, and is one of Egypt’s most expensive productions to date.
Tomatometer: 85%
A high school stutterer joins the debate team for the affections of a girl in this festival favorite, from director Jeffrey Blitz (Spellbound).
Tomatometer: 68%
Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis, and Melissa McCarthy triple up in three separate but intertwined tales from the writer of Go and Big Fish.
Tomatometer: 14%
Hip-pop star Omarion Grandberry stars in yet another dancing teen movie — this time, set to the beat of Puerto Rico’s reggaeton scene — but, according to the scribes, this dance floor is overflowing with cliche after cliche.
Tomatometer: 14%
If we can thank the makers of this road comedy about a corporate suit tasked with driving his boss’ wild niece cross-country, it’s the bounty of delightfully pointed critic quotes it inspired. “Bad really is too delicate a word to describe this film” may sound harsh, but so is wasting your DVD dollars on such a critically-loathed release.
Tomatometer: 7%
Though many inspirational sports movies deserve to be taken to task for the abuse of cliche and melodrama, the genre didn’t deserve this…behold, one of the year’s worst films, and a member of the elite single-digit Tomatometer club!
Tomatometer: 1%
And finally, the very worst release to hit shelves this week, the likes of which we quite possibly won’t see again for a while. What does it really take to get a one percent rating on the Tomatometer? Your guess is as good as ours, since we won’t be seeing this sequel. Cuba Gooding Jr., where did you go wrong??
Consider yourself warned. ‘Til next week, happy renting!
The parade of critics’ year-end best-of lists continued yesterday, with panels in Toronto, San Diego, and Austin weighing in on their favorite films of 2007.
In Toronto, the clear winner was No Country for Old Men, which nabbed four prizes, including best film. A complete list of winners follows, with Tomatometers in parentheses:
Best Film:
No Country for Old Men (95 percent)
Best Director:
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Best Screenplay:
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Best Actor:
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises (88 percent)
Best Actress:
Julie Christie, Away From Her (95 percent) / Ellen Page, Juno (94 percent) (tie)
Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Best Supporting Actress:
Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There (80 percent)
Best Animated Feature:
Ratatouille (97 percent)
Best Foreign-Language Film:
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (96 percent)
Best Documentary:
No End in Sight (95 percent)
Not to be outdone, the San Diego Film Critics Society heaped its own stack o’ praise on No Country, but saved plenty of love for other films along the way:
Best Film:
No Country for Old Men
Best Director:
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood (96 percent)
Best Actor:
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Best Actress:
Julie Christie, Away From Her
Best Supporting Actor:
Tommy Lee Jones, No Country for Old Men
Best Supporting Actress:
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone (93 percent)
Best Original Screenplay:
Diablo Cody, Juno
Best Adapted Screenplay:
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Best Foreign Language Film:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (94 percent)
Best Documentary:
(tie) No End in Sight and Deep Water (96 percent)
Best Animated Feature:
Ratatouille
Best Cinematography:
Roger Deakins, No Country for Old Men
Best Production Design:
Dante Ferretti, Sweeney Todd (86 percent)
Best Editor:
Paul Tothill, Atonement (84 percent)
Best Score:
Jonny Greenwood, There Will Be Blood
Best Ensemble Performance:
No Country for Old Men
And finally, last but not least, the Austin Film Critics Association gave big ups to There Will Be Blood, bestowing Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor honors upon the P.T. Anderson drama. Read on:
Best Film:
There Will Be Blood
Best Director:
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Best Actor:
Daniel Day Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Best Actress:
Ellen Page, Juno
Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem, No Country For Old Men
Best Supporting Actress:
Allison Janney, Juno
Best Foreign Film:
Black Book (76 percent)
Best Documentary:
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (96 percent)
Best Animated Film:
Ratatouille
Best First Film:
Ben Affleck, Gone Baby Gone
Best Original Screenplay:
Diablo Cody, Juno
Best Adapted Screenplay:
Ethan & Joel Coen, No Country For Old Men
Best Cinematography:
Robert Elswit, There Will Be Blood
Best Original Score:
Jonny Greenwood, There Will Be Blood
Breakthrough Artist:
Michael Cera, Superbad (87 percent), Juno
Source: Variety (Toronto)
Source: Variety (San Diego)
Source: Variety (Austin)
This week at RTIndie: IFC brings indies to the people; Seth Gordon capitalizes on the success of The King of Kong; anime classic Grave of the Fireflies gets the remake treatment; and a Certified Fresh Mumblecore touchstone is our DVD Pick of the Week.
IFC Beefs Up Theatrical/On-Demand Program
First, the bad news for IFC: The company’s attempts to distribute bigger-budget movies didn’t work. The good news for people who like indie movies: IFC will be giving more attention to its First Take program, in which smaller films will receive a theatrical and on-demand release on the same day.
The First Take films include indie movies with budgets under $3 million and foreign fare. So far, First Take has released This Is England (92 percent on the Tomatometer), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (88 percent), and Black Sheep (70 percent) simultaneously in theaters and on cable; Gus Van Sant‘s Paranoid Park and the Palme D’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days are some of the program’s upcoming highlights. Even if these films only play in a few cities during their theatrical runs, they can be seen in 40 million homes, increasing the availability for edgier first-run fare.
This week’s First Take release is Joe Swanberg‘s Hannah Takes the Stairs, which tells the story of a young woman’s romantic connections and disconnections over the course of a summer. Swanberg told RT he’s thrilled to have the added exposure of cable not only as a filmmaker, but as a movie buff as well.
“It’s really exciting,” Swanberg said. “I live in Chicago, where I have to wait a really long time for a lot of movies to come through, so that’s really cool.”
IFC’s attempt to go big(ger) time didn’t really pay off. Despite strong reviews (Certified Fresh at 77 percent on the Tomatometer) You Kill Me didn’t exactly kill at the box office, taking in around $2.4 million. The movie, starring Ben Kingsley, Téa Leoni, and Luke Wilson, was something of a test case for IFC’s plan for distributing indies with slightly larger budgets. Subsequently, IFC decided to scrap its release of Penelope, starring Christina Ricci and Reese Witherspoon, and has no bigger movies on its release slate.
(Check out our full interview with Swanberg here. Also, we caught Paranoid Park at Cannes; click here for our review.)
Like An Accomplished Gamer, Kong Helmer Gordon Moves Up A Level
Things are looking good for Seth Gordon, as his Slamdance-approved doc The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters continues to make waves. Not only is Kong winning near-universal praise from critics (it’s currently at 97 percent on the Tomatometer), it’s getting Gordon plenty of attention from Hollywood.
Gordon has signed on to direct Four Christmases, a comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon about a couple, each with divorced parents, who must find a way to attend four Christmas celebrations. The project, which will be distributed by New Line, previously had several directors attached, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
In addition, Cinematical notes that Gordon is starting work on The Only Living Boy in New York, the tale of a down-on-his-luck post-collegiate who finds himself contemplating an affair with his dad’s mistress. Columbia Pictures will release the film in 2008.
And that’s not all. It appears Gordon is also in the early stages of a fictional remake of The King of Kong, and hopes to attract the services of such notables as Johnny Depp or Edward Norton to play one of the gamers. The documentary version tells the story of two archrivals who do battle in the realm of Donkey Kong.
Fireflies Rises From the Grave in Live-Action Remake
There have been a ton of cartoons and comics that have gotten live-action remakes; it appears the latest will be the classic 1988 animated feature Grave of the Fireflies. ScreenDaily is reporting that Taro Hyugaji will helm the remake, which tells the harrowing story of two children left homeless by bombings in the last days of WWII. The original (89 percent), directed by Isao Takahata, is one of the seminal masterpieces of anime, but that doesn’t mean filmmakers haven’t tried to give the story another go before. In 2005, another version of Fireflies was produced for Japanese television.
RTIndie DVD Pick of the Week: Mutual Appreciation
Movie critics are always on the lookout for a filmmaker who’s the “voice of their generation.” In the case of Andrew Bujalski, said voice is peppered with “ums,” “likes,” and “y’knows.” But don’t mistake his latest, Mutual Appreciation, as mere emo posturing. With Appreciation and his previous film, Funny Ha Ha, Bujalski has carved out a distinctive niche in the world of no-budget filmmaking; he has a wonderful ear for how twentysomethings express themselves — or, as the case may be, try to figure out how they feel as they talk. Mutual Appreciation is a few days in the live of Alan (Justin Rice), an Elvis Costello-esque indie rocker looking for a band — and finding himself in the midst of several romantic possibilities. Don’t be put off by the grainy black-and-white cinematography or the hipster trappings; Bujalski gets remarkable performances from his cast of unknowns, and post-collegians (or introspective-types of any age) will see a lot of themselves in Mutual Appreciation. And the music’s pretty good, too. Appreciation is at 88 percent on the Tomatometer; it, along with Funny Ha Ha and Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs, are playing in New York as part of The New Talkies: Generation D.I.Y., which runs through Sept. 4.)
