Sports

To celebrate the release of Creed III, Guardian writers have made the case for why their favourite sports movie should also be yours.

A young Spike Lee makes a cameo in the film, and comes in with hard truths to the young players: “The only reason you are here is because you can make their schools win and they can make a lot of money,” he says. But in the misadventures of holy-fool-as-himbo Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta), a world-renowned Portuguese footballer with more than a passing resemblance to Cristiano Ronaldo, writer-directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt concocted a demented political thriller in which the “beautiful game” matters less than the fluidity of gender, the sinister machinations of the state, and Western attitudes toward refugees. An amazingly photographed homage to a very specific, very brutal period in American boxing in the 1940s and 50s, equally saturated by organised crime and racism, Raging Bull is also an unblinking study of what in those days (the 1950s, or the 1980s) wasn’t called “toxic masculinity”; Robert de Niro, in what remains arguably his greatest role, was brilliantly plausible as an Italian-American slugger of the old school, and a vicious, unreconstructed domestic abuser. Director Steve James’s intimate portrait of Arthur Agee and William Gates, both harboring dreams of using their talent to escape poverty, is less about the adrenaline rush of a Friday night victory than it is about shining a light on an entire system that depends on exploitation for its excitement. Sunday’s gonzo tone is set by director Oliver Stone, a master of the form who deftly embroiders a complex narrative about the ripple effects of a quarterback controversy on a franchise and coach in faded glory. [finale move](https://www.yahoo.com/news/cutting-edge-pulled-off-impossible-pamchenko-170130186.html) (not to mention [lines like](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZNp_QIOvpI): “There are two things I do really well, sweetheart, and skating’s the other one.”). It was partly because Brad Pitt was at his effortless movie star best and partly because Aaron Sorkin’s elegant dialogue was avoiding his showy, overwritten worst, but mostly because the world being created was such a rich and textured joy to be a part of – explained just enough to a layman like me and exciting not because of the grand theatrics of what was happening on the field but the greater wealth of what was taking place off. I have seen Miracle so many times – in the car on the way to and from tournaments, in the basement with teammates, quoted in the locker room – that its recreations of the team’s development into a single unit of belief (and Kurt Russell’s plaid suits) are part of the bedrock of my movie memory. Yet maybe due to the money-spinning franchise that followed – the eight largely generic sequels, the Broadway musical, the [mass-market novelizations](https://twitter.com/BryanAGraham/status/1570096347822411779) and video games – the original is somehow under-appreciated for what made it special: a tender, naturalistic character piece with a note-perfect script bound to universal themes of ambition, redemption and the drive for victory on one’s own terms. [Moneyball](https://www.theguardian.com/film/moneyball), I’ve paid zero attention to baseball ever since (aside from a rewatch or two of Tony Scott’s strange and affecting 1996 thriller The Fan). As someone who doesn’t count sports as a major part of my life, the best sports movies find a way to suddenly make me briefly, terribly invested in something I may never be invested in again. [Kevin Costner](https://www.theguardian.com/film/kevin-costner) plays a journeyman catcher who’s spent almost no time outside the minor leagues, where his job is teach the finer points of the game to cocky young flamethrowers like “Nuke” Laloosh (Tim Robbins) before they graduate to “The Big Show”.