Honor roll:Sports films
From AwardAnnals
Each of these Sports films has received at least one award nomination. They are ranked by honors received.
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The come-from-behind winner of the 1981 Oscar for best picture, Chariots of Fire either strikes you as either a cold exercise in mechanical manipulation or as a tale of true determination and inspiration. The heroes are an unlikely pair of young athletes who ran for Great Britain in the 1924 Paris Olympics: devout Protestant Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a divinity student whose running makes him feel closer to God, and Jewish Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), a highly competitive Cambridge student who has to surmount the institutional hurdles of class…
A phenomenal hit when it was released in 1989, Field of Dreams has become a modern classic and a uniquely American slice of cinema. It functions effectively as a moving drama about the power of dreams, a fantasy ode to our national pastime, and a brilliant adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s exquisite baseball novel Shoeless Joe. Kinsella himself found the film a delightful surprise, differing greatly from his novel but benefiting from its own creative variations. It is the film that cemented Kevin Costner’s status as an all-American screen star, but the…
Peter Yates’s flag-waving film stands with To Kill a Mockingbird and American Graffiti as one of the best films about small-town Americana. Steve Tesich won an Oscar for his semi-biographical screenplay about four 19-year-olds who don’t know what to do after high school. Dave Stohler (Dennis Christopher) and his three friends—ex-football star Mike (Dennis Quaid), wily comedian Cyril (Daniel Stern), and tough kid Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley)—are doomed to live in the college town of Bloomington, Indiana, where the local kids (nicknamed “Cutters”—a…
Proving that truth is often greater than fiction, the handsome production of Seabiscuit offers a healthy alternative to Hollywood’s staple diet of mayhem. With superior production values at his disposal, writer-director Gary Ross (Pleasantville) is a bit too reverent toward Laura Hillenbrand’s captivating bestseller, unnecessarily using archival material—and David McCullough’s familiar PBS-styled narration—to pay Ken Burns-like tribute to Hillenbrand’s acclaimed history of Seabiscuit, the knobby-kneed thoroughbred who “came from behind” in the late…
Martin Scorsese’s brutal black-and-white biography of self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta was chosen as the best film of the 1980s in a major critics’ poll at the end of the decade, and it’s a knockout piece of filmmaking. Robert De Niro plays LaMotta (famously putting on 50 pounds for the later scenes), a man tormented by demons he doesn’t understand and prone to uncontrollably violent temper tantrums and fits of irrational jealousy. He marries a striking young blond (Cathy Moriarty), his sexual ideal, and then terrorizes her with never-ending accusations of…
In his direction of The Hurricane, veteran filmmaker Norman Jewison understands that slavish loyalty to factual detail is no guarantee of compelling screen biography. In telling the story of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter—who was wrongly convicted of murder in 1967 and spent nearly two decades in jail—Jewison and his screenwriters compress time, combine characters, and rearrange events with a nonchalance that would be galling if they didn’t remain honest to the core truth of Carter’s ordeal. Because of that emotional integrity—and because Denzel Washington…
Nanette Burstein, Brett Morgen
That every cliché and stereotype has some basis in fact is axiomatic. Boxing movies have long relied on archetypes such as the tough-but-big-hearted trainer who acts as a mentor, the crooked promoter, the hard-nosed kid who fights his way from the streets to the top. On the Ropes has all of these, but the kicker is this film isn’t fiction; this is a remarkable documentary that follows three young boxers, George, Noel, and Tyrene, in and out of the ring as they struggle with tough circumstances in their Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood while they train…
Yet another potent (although critically underrated) drama from Jim Sheridan and Daniel Day-Lewis, the Irish director and British star (respectively) of My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father. The story focuses on Danny Flynn (Day-Lewis), a promising boxer who had been imprisoned at age 18 for associating with IRA terrorists. After serving a 14-year sentence, he returns to his Belfast neighborhood at a time when local IRA leader Joe Hamill (Brian Cox) is attempting to negotiate a peace treaty with the British. Despite having no further interest…
This effects-heavy, 1994 remake of the 1951 film starring Janet Leigh and Keenan Wynn is all computer-generated pizzazz, with none of the charm or imagination of the original. Aimed squarely at children this time, the story focuses on a boy who gets some divine intervention on behalf of his favorite ball club. Christopher Lloyd plays the head angel, and Danny Glover is good as the team’s manager, but the real star of the film—for better or worse—is the software that makes a glowing, celestial presence on the field seem real. —Tom Keogh
Baseball movies seem like a sure thing, combining the drama of the game with positive values. So it’s too bad this pleasant film takes the field in the most superficial way. Henry, the worst player in Little League, suffers an injury that miraculously heals as the strongest pitching arm in the world. His life becomes a kid’s dream with a career in the Majors, but nothing really happens. His strength cannot hide his lack of skill, yet audiences love him, probably to support subplots such as the team being rescued from bankruptcy and Mom’s boyfriend turning bad.…
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