Sports movies always have an inspirational story line and eventually make you want to stand up and cheer for the athletes and teams who overcome huge challenges, whilst learning an important lesson upon the way.
With Oscar® winning director Clint Eastwood’s Invictus hitting cinemas’ on 5th February, which tells the inspiring true story of how Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) joined forces with the captain of South Africa’s rugby team, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), to help unite their country, we’ve picked our top 10 sporting movies of all time to coincide with the film release that critics are calling an ‘inspiring’, ‘sincere’ and ‘a remarkable picture’.
10. Any Given Sunday (1999) American football
Life is a contact sport
Director: Oliver Stone
Cast: Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Dennis Quaid, James Woods, Jamie Foxx, LL Cool J
Aging football coach, Tony D’Amato (Pacino), is struggling with his personal and professional life while trying to hold together the Miami Sharks. He is dealt a cruel blow when the star quarterback, Cap Rooney (Quaid), is injured and D’Amato is forced to turn to third-string benchwarmer, Willia Beaman (Foxx).
Beaman seizes what he believes to be his last shot at the big-time and turns in a string of stunning performances forcing D’Amato to question his traditional approach to the game and, indeed, life itself.
As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that marketing and business are as much a part of the game as the sport.
9. Remember The Titans (2000) American football
History is written by the winners
Director: Boaz Yakin
Cast: Denzel Washington, Will Patton, Wood Harris, Ryan Hurst, Donald Faison, Craig Kirkwood
Racial prejudice has no place in American football these days, with white and black players being accepted as equal in all positions, even quarterback.
This poignant film takes us back to the early 1970s and Virginia, where the resented integration of black and white children at school is most keenly felt on the school football team.
Coach Boone (Washington) is brought in as head coach over his white predecessor (Patton) but is told that he will be fired if his team lose any games during the season. Gradually he builds a multiracial team of who fight their way to the state championship.
8. A League Of Their Own (1992) Baseball
To achieve the incredible you have to attempt the impossible
Director: Penny Marshall
Cast: Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Madonna, Lori Petty, Jon Lovitz, David Strathairn
The true story of a women’s baseball team during the Second World War is charming, heart-warming and very seldom inane.
The story, which begins in the 1990s with the girls being installed in the baseball Hall of Fame, is based on the performance of the Rockford Peaches in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which existed from 1943 to 1954. Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing-gum magnate and owner of the Chicago Cubs, created the league in fear that the Major League teams would disband during the war.
As well as a battle against prejudice, the film is also a story about sibling rivalry between Dottie (Davis), "the best player in the league", and her sister, Kit (Petty). Davis joined the cast late as a replacement for Debra Winger, to which she turns in a fine performance as a player as well as an actor.
Overseeing the team is Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan. Unsurprisingly, he is a one-time baseball hero turned to drink, but Hanks brings his usual charm and likeability to the role.
7. Cinderella Man (2005) Boxing
One man’s extraordinary fight to save the family he loved
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Russell Crowe, Renee Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Craig Bierko, Paddy Considine, Bruce McGill
Ron Howard tells a true story of the common man who rises again as James J Braddock (Crowe), a former prizefighter who was in debt and at rock bottom.
In a last-ditch attempt to help his family and lift his self-esteem, Braddock returns to the ring. No one gives him a chance, until he suddenly finds himself taking on the heavyweight champion of the world.
Crowe’s subtle acting and the excellent direction help to elevate the crunching final showdown between Braddock and Max Baer (Bierko), who has killed two men in the ring, into a brutal, bloody and fight scene.
6. Jerry Maguire (1996) American football
Everybody loved him . . . everybody disappeared
Director: Cameron Crowe
Cast: Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr, Renee Zellweger, Kelly Preston, Jerry O’Connell, Jay Mohr
Jerry Maguire (Cruise) is a sports agent who is willing to do just about anything to get the best deals for his clients . However, he starts to feels uncomfortable about the business as it is now more about the money and not about the clients.
He creates a memo, voicing his doubts, for which he gets a standing ovation from his colleagues and the heave ho form his bosses.
Only one client, a moderate player for the Arizona Cardinals called Rod Tidwell (Gooding), and one colleague, Dorothy (Zellweger), a widowed accountant who has developed a crush on him, stay with him and offer to help him to rebuild his career.
The film was nominated for five Oscars, winning Gooding one for Best Supporting Actor and was the fifth Tom Cruise film in a row to make more than $100 million at the Box Office.
5. Chariots of Fire (1981) Athletics
Two men chasing dreams of glory
Director: Hugh Hudson
Cast: Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Ian Holm, Nigel Havers, Nicholas Farrell, Cheryl Campbell
A story of devotion, guts and athletic glory, with a fantastic soundtrack to boot. Chariots of Fire is the tale of the 1924 Olympic Games and two British athletes, a devout Scottish missionary and a Jewish student at Cambridge, the son of immigrants.
Both compete for their dignity: Eric Liddell (Charleson) runs in the 400 metres; Harold Abrahams (Cross), his rival at the sprint, runs to prove his worth to the anti-Semites.
The film is patriotic and class conscious, but this provides the spur for Abrahams to fight for acceptance. The prejudice is not just a question of birth or wealth, but of approach.
One of the wonderful scenes is when Abrahams discusses what drives him with his college masters, who are appalled by his deviation from the amateur ethos. "You’ve hired a professional coach, you’ve adopted a professional attitude," Lindsay Anderson says with scorn.
4. National Velvet (1944) Racing
MGM’s great technicolour heart drama
Director: Clarence Brown
Cast: Mickey Rooney, Donald Crisp, Elizabeth Taylor, Anne Revere, Angela Lansbury, Jackie Butch Jenkins
National Velvet is set during the Second World War that involves messages about courage under adversity. A 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor plays Velvet, the girl with a passion for horses who wins a spirited steed, Pi rate in a lottery.
Taylor lavishes much love on the horse and together with a vagrant former jockey named Mi Taylor (Rourke), she begins to train Pirate for the Grand National.
Known for invoking sentiment and happy feelings, the feel-good films excellence is Velvet’s single-minded determination, supported by her mother (Revere, in an Oscar-winning role).
3. Million Dollar Baby (2004) Boxing
It’s the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you
Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Jay Baruchel, Mike Colter, Lucia Rijker
There are a few directors that challenge genres better than Eastwood, and Million Dollar Baby stands out as a very unusual boxing movie, and not just because it is women focused.
As usual, Eastwood, directing his 25th film, gives himself the best part as Frankie Dunn, a devoutly Catholic boxing trainer struggling to deal with the separation of his daughter.
Dunn is given a chance for redemption when Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank), a tough but subtle fighter, arrives at his gym. She has fought well on raw talent and belief, but needs someone to believe in her and develop her potential.
Boxing is her way up in the world, "otherwise I might as well go back home, buy a used trailer and get a deep fryer", she says. Grudgingly, Frankie takes her on and the two develop a touching relationship before a life-and-death dilemma threatens to upset their world.
The film won four Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director awards and acting awards for Swank and Freeman.
2.Rocky (1976) Boxing
His whole life was a million-to-one shot
Director: John D. Avildsen
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Burgess Meredith, Thayer David
Even after 30 years after the release of Rocky, sportsmen and women around the world still go for their morning run with the theme tune blaring through their headphones
Rocky is far more than an inspirational tale about the power of the human spirit and the rise of the underdog. It is also a sensitive and powerful study of modesty.
The hero is a self-conscious mumbler, brought to life by Stallone in a performance demanding comparison with Marlon Brando in his prime. Adrian (Shire), the girl who works in the local pet shop, is shy almost to the point of muteness.
Some have interpreted Rocky’s defeat by Apollo Creed as a did to at Hollywood’s over-romanticising. He may lose the fight but he wins the girl and achieves his stated ambition of being on his feet at the final bell.
This is an undoubtedly a feel-good movie and a popular and critical triumph!
1. Raging Bull (1980) Boxing
I’m da boss, I’m da boss, I’m da boss, I’m da boss, I’m da boss...
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci, Frank Vincent, Nicholas Colasanto, Theresa Saldana, Mario Gallo, Frank Adonis, Joseph Bono, Frank Topham, Lori Anne Flax, Charles Scorsese, Don Dunphy, Bill Hanrahan, Rita Bennett
Raging Bull is not just a great film about boxing; it is a great film by any standards and, many critics indeed regard it as the best movie of the 1980s .
Its subject is Jake La Motta, a violent kid from the Bronx, who became world middleweight champion in the 1940s. But if boxing is the hub around which it revolves, its true concern is the man himself rather than simply the prize-fighter and his exploits.
Certainly his epic encounters with Sugar Ray Robinson and others are depicted in all their gory, but it is La Motta’s private life, especially his attitude towards women, that most interests the director, Scorsese, and his writers.
As portrayed, brilliantly, by De Niro, La Motta is a man of limited imagination and low self-esteem, seething with emotions that he cannot articulate. In his relationship with his wife Vickie (Moriarty) those emotions, fuelled by sexual inadequacy and lack of understanding, are mostly suspicion and jealousy, which he expresses in violence because he knows no other way.
If you’re after something that will thrill and excite you, stir your blood lust and at the same time make you think, particularly about the eternal complexity of the male-female relationship, this is not to be missed.
Invictus is released 5th February.
Sports movies always have an inspirational story line and eventually make you want to stand up and cheer for the athletes and teams who overcome huge challenges, whilst learning an important lesson upon the way.
With Oscar® winning director Clint Eastwood’s Invictus hitting cinemas’ on 5th February, which tells the inspiring true story of how Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) joined forces with the captain of South Africa’s rugby team, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), to help unite their country, we’ve picked our top 10 sporting movies of all time to coincide with the film release that critics are calling an ‘inspiring’, ‘sincere’ and ‘a remarkable picture’.
10. Any Given Sunday (1999) American football
Life is a contact sport
Director: Oliver Stone
Cast: Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Dennis Quaid, James Woods, Jamie Foxx, LL Cool J
Aging football coach, Tony D’Amato (Pacino), is struggling with his personal and professional life while trying to hold together the Miami Sharks. He is dealt a cruel blow when the star quarterback, Cap Rooney (Quaid), is injured and D’Amato is forced to turn to third-string benchwarmer, Willia Beaman (Foxx).
Beaman seizes what he believes to be his last shot at the big-time and turns in a string of stunning performances forcing D’Amato to question his traditional approach to the game and, indeed, life itself.
As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that marketing and business are as much a part of the game as the sport.
9. Remember The Titans (2000) American football
History is written by the winners
Director: Boaz Yakin
Cast: Denzel Washington, Will Patton, Wood Harris, Ryan Hurst, Donald Faison, Craig Kirkwood
Racial prejudice has no place in American football these days, with white and black players being accepted as equal in all positions, even quarterback.
This poignant film takes us back to the early 1970s and Virginia, where the resented integration of black and white children at school is most keenly felt on the school football team.
Coach Boone (Washington) is brought in as head coach over his white predecessor (Patton) but is told that he will be fired if his team lose any games during the season. Gradually he builds a multiracial team of who fight their way to the state championship.
8. A League Of Their Own (1992) Baseball
To achieve the incredible you have to attempt the impossible
Director: Penny Marshall
Cast: Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Madonna, Lori Petty, Jon Lovitz, David Strathairn
The true story of a women’s baseball team during the Second World War is charming, heart-warming and very seldom inane.
The story, which begins in the 1990s with the girls being installed in the baseball Hall of Fame, is based on the performance of the Rockford Peaches in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which existed from 1943 to 1954. Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing-gum magnate and owner of the Chicago Cubs, created the league in fear that the Major League teams would disband during the war.
As well as a battle against prejudice, the film is also a story about sibling rivalry between Dottie (Davis), "the best player in the league", and her sister, Kit (Petty). Davis joined the cast late as a replacement for Debra Winger, to which she turns in a fine performance as a player as well as an actor.
Overseeing the team is Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan. Unsurprisingly, he is a one-time baseball hero turned to drink, but Hanks brings his usual charm and likeability to the role.
7. Cinderella Man (2005) Boxing
One man’s extraordinary fight to save the family he loved
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Russell Crowe, Renee Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Craig Bierko, Paddy Considine, Bruce McGill
Ron Howard tells a true story of the common man who rises again as James J Braddock (Crowe), a former prizefighter who was in debt and at rock bottom.
In a last-ditch attempt to help his family and lift his self-esteem, Braddock returns to the ring. No one gives him a chance, until he suddenly finds himself taking on the heavyweight champion of the world.
Crowe’s subtle acting and the excellent direction help to elevate the crunching final showdown between Braddock and Max Baer (Bierko), who has killed two men in the ring, into a brutal, bloody and fight scene.
6. Jerry Maguire (1996) American football
Everybody loved him . . . everybody disappeared