Raging Bull
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1980
Scorsese shot boxing as penance rather than sport, and audiences come out feeling bruised: De Niro's jealousy destroys everyone near him, in the blackest black and white imaginable.
★ 9.6
The Movies canon
Sourced and screened.
Every film chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Hoop Dreams
Directed by Steve James
1994
Its exclusion from the documentary Oscar shortlist caused enough outrage that the Academy changed its rules: five years with two Chicago teenagers, and it is barely about basketball.
★ 7.5
The Hustler
Directed by Robert Rossen
1961
Nobody has filmed a game better: Newman's pool hustler wants to be great and cannot get out of his own way, and the smoke never leaves the room.
★ 7.0
Million Dollar Baby
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2004
Eastwood spends an hour making you love a boxing underdog story and then does something else entirely: nothing in American film is tougher than where it ends up.
★ 6.9
Rocky
Directed by John G. Avildsen
1976
Stallone wrote it himself and would not sell the script unless he could star: a club fighter from Philadelphia is handed a title shot as a publicity stunt, and takes it completely seriously.
★ 6.8
Moneyball
Directed by Bennett Miller
2011
A film about a spreadsheet that plays like a thriller: Sorkin and Zaillian turn Billy Beane's 2002 Oakland roster into an argument between a broke general manager and every scout in his building.
★ 6.7
The Wrestler
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
2008
Mickey Rourke had been out of serious work for fifteen years and walked straight back into this: a broken-down wrestler working autograph shows in New Jersey, filmed like a documentary from behind.
★ 6.5
When We Were Kings
Directed by Leon Gast
1996
Leon Gast shot the footage in 1974 and could not finish the film for twenty-two years: Ali in Kinshasa, talking constantly, in the weeks before the biggest fight of his life.
★ 6.2
Friday Night Lights
Directed by Peter Berg
2004
High-school football is the surface; the subject is a town with nothing else: Odessa, Texas in 1988, filmed handheld and close, where a losing season is a civic emergency.
★ 5.9
The Fighter
Directed by David O. Russell
2010
Christian Bale plays the older brother who threw away his own career and cannot stop coaching: Lowell, Massachusetts shot from inside the family, which is the hardest opponent in it.
★ 5.6
Field of Dreams
Directed by Phil Alden Robinson
1989
They built the field on an Iowa farm and people still drive to see it: a man plows under his corn because a voice tells him to, and the last reel gets everyone.
★ 5.4
Jerry Maguire
Directed by Cameron Crowe
1996
Cameron Crowe wrote a sports movie that is really about whether you can do a job decently: three catchphrases entered the language, and Tom Cruise has never been more likable.
★ 5.2
Caddyshack
Directed by Harold Ramis
1980
Bill Murray improvised nearly all of his part and the gopher was added after shooting finished: a country club comedy with no functioning plot and absolutely no need for one.
★ 5.1
Bull Durham
Directed by Ron Shelton
1988
Ron Shelton played five years of minor league baseball and wrote what he actually saw: the mound conference about wedding presents is the funniest scene in any sports film.
★ 4.8
Rush
Directed by Ron Howard
2013
Ron Howard made the best racing film by making it about two men who need each other: James Hunt and Niki Lauda in 1976, and the engines were recorded from the actual cars.
★ 4.8
Hoosiers
Directed by David Anspaugh
1986
Indiana still argues about how close it is to what actually happened in 1954: Gene Hackman coaches a town of a few hundred people who care about nothing else at all.
★ 4.5
The Natural
Directed by Barry Levinson
1984
Randy Newman's fanfare is the sound of American sport: Robert Redford plays a player who arrives too old and too late, and the film treats baseball as an outright myth.
★ 4.4
Remember the Titans
Directed by Boaz Yakin
2000
Denzel Washington coaches the first integrated team at a Virginia high school in 1971: the history is tidied up considerably, and it still gets a room every single time.
★ 4.3
Slap Shot
Directed by George Roy Hill
1977
Real minor-league players filled most of the roster and three of them became the Hanson Brothers: Paul Newman coaches a dying team that discovers the crowd will pay for violence.
★ 4.1
Cinderella Man
Directed by Ron Howard
2005
James Braddock was a broken-handed longshoreman on relief when he got a fight nobody expected him to survive: Ron Howard films the Depression as the real opponent, and Paul Giamatti steals it.
★ 4.1
He Got Game
Directed by Spike Lee
1998
Spike Lee scored a basketball film with Aaron Copland and cast an NBA guard in the lead: a father is released from prison for a week to talk his son into a school.
★ 4.0
The Sandlot
Directed by David Mickey Evans
1993
It has become the film American men quote at each other about being eleven: a new kid in 1962 learns baseball on a vacant lot, and the stakes are imaginary and total.
★ 3.9
Rudy
Directed by David Anspaugh
1993
Notre Dame had not allowed a film crew on campus in fifty years: a kid with no size and no grades wants to dress for one game, and everybody tells him no.
★ 3.7
Miracle
Directed by Gavin O'Connor
2004
They cast hockey players and taught them to act rather than the reverse: Kurt Russell plays Herb Brooks skating his young Olympic squad into the ground before Lake Placid in 1980.
★ 3.6
The Endless Summer
Directed by Bruce Brown
1966
Bruce Brown could not get a distributor so he rented cinemas himself, starting in Wichita in January snow: two surfers follow summer around the world, and the narration is unhurried and dry.
★ 3.4
The Bad News Bears
Directed by Michael Ritchie
1976
The children swear constantly, the coach drinks in the dugout, and nobody learns very much: Walter Matthau took a Little League team and made the least sentimental sports film ever released.
★ 3.3
Eight Men Out
Directed by John Sayles
1988
The 1919 World Series fix filmed as a labor dispute rather than a scandal: John Sayles shows eight underpaid White Sox taking money from gamblers, and an owner who pays them nothing.
★ 3.3
Chariots of Fire
Directed by Hugh Hudson
1981 · United Kingdom
The Vangelis theme is so famous that people forget the film underneath is about religion: two runners at the 1924 Olympics, one running for God and one against English antisemitism.
★ 3.3
White Men Can't Jump
Directed by Ron Shelton
1992
Nobody has ever written trash talk this well: Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson hustle Los Angeles playground courts, and the insults are more athletic than the basketball.
★ 3.1
The Longest Yard
Directed by Robert Aldrich
1974
Burt Reynolds played college football and you can see it in every collision: a disgraced quarterback in a Georgia prison is ordered to build a team out of the inmates.
★ 2.6
North Dallas Forty
Directed by Ted Kotcheff
1979
The NFL refused all cooperation and players said it was the only accurate football film ever made: Nick Nolte plays a receiver held together by painkillers and stubbornness for one more season.
★ 2.3