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.
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.
Skate Kitchen acts as a celebration of all the ways non-normative womanhood seeps into the very nature of skateboarding.
Billy Elliot isn’t about a boy becoming a dancer, but rather a boy becoming himself.
Self-reflective and willing to laugh at himself, Tony Hawk is not just iconic but eminently watchable, endearing, and incisive in equal measure.
The Phenom is a sports film for people, like me, who don’t enjoy sports films.
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.
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).
On three great movies about gamblers: Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels, Robert Altman’s California Split, and Ryan Fleck’s Mississippi Grind.
