On three great movies about gamblers: Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels, Robert Altman’s California Split, and Ryan Fleck’s Mississippi Grind.
On the latest episode of the podcast, we’re joined by ace writer and admitted baseball enthusiast Frank Falisi to run the numbers on Bennett Miller’s Oscar-nominated ode to analytics, Moneyball (2011).
Firmly in his prime at the age of 28, Bobby Jones retired from golf and did what any self-respecting ex-athlete would do: he went to Hollywood.
The Phenom is a sports film for people, like me, who don’t enjoy sports films.
Self-reflective and willing to laugh at himself, Tony Hawk is not just iconic but eminently watchable, endearing, and incisive in equal measure.
Billy Elliot isn’t about a boy becoming a dancer, but rather a boy becoming himself.
Skate Kitchen acts as a celebration of all the ways non-normative womanhood seeps into the very nature of skateboarding.
In Offside, football is both a metaphor for social discrimination and a medium of protest. By the end, it's also a means of a miraculous escape.
Less parable, more portrait of an athlete as a young man, Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer reminds us that our yearning for a moral arc of sport is just that: a yearning.