Free Republic

One of the most dramatic of sports stories gets the expert film it deserves in “The Russian Five,” a documentary that is moving in ways you won’t see coming. The sport is professional ice hockey, specifically the saga of the Detroit Red Wings, who in the 1990s changed both their professional trajectory and the way the game is played in the National Hockey League by boldly adding Russian players to the mix. The intensely human situations revealed by director Joshua Riehl will captivate you even if you don’t know a puck from a ping-pong ball. The key to “Russian Five’s”...

Well there was a time when I would have had to put The Natural in my top 3. However in the last 3 years, unlike with most genres, I would say sports movies have improved with time. So without further ado, here are mine. I'm sure you will notice one similarity runs through all.

Sports movies With the Super Bowl in mind — that time when Americans gather, overeat and enjoy the outpourings of our greatest advertising agencies — it is fitting to reflect upon the core myth that animates our nation. No, I don’t mean the western, which is so 19th century. I mean the sports movie, the epic that defines contemporary America. Over the past several years, theaters have been inundated by a series of films that all have the same plot. Whether it is “Hoosiers,” “Glory Road,” “Coach Carter,” “Remember the Titans,” “Miracle,” “The Replacements” or a hundred others, the core...