Champions (2023)

A drunk driver (Woody Harrelson) is court-appointed to coach "The Friends", a basketball team made up of intellectually disabled youths, which is a position that he thinks hardly compares to the work he usually does with national league teams, but you know at the outset of this comedy-sports movie that he will fall in love with his work, fall in love with a woman with whom he initially grates, and come to better appreciate himself and his charges over the course of an easy - and on a couple of occasions emotional - watch.

★★★☆☆

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The Longest Yard (2005)

Winding up in jail after a drunken car crash, an ex-football player and man-generally-making-a-giant-mess-of-his-life Paul Crewe (Sandler) is coerced by the prison warden to coach a football team made up of prisoners, but things become complicated in this remake of the 1974 original when this reluctant coach becomes torn between wanting his ragtag team of prisoners to win an upcoming game versus prison guards (and so redeeming himself after so much failure) and succumbing to pressure from the prison warden to let the prison staff win.

★★★☆☆

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The Blind Side (2009)

In this adaptation of Michael (Moneyball, The Big Short) Lewis' based-on-fact book, a woman (Sandra Bullock) takes in a homeless student, real-life Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), and helps him carve out an education and a future in sport, but while the first half pulls at heartstrings with its Christian saviour story and the second half occasionally amuses with its cameo-laden comedic look at the NFL college draft, what you realise by the end is that Oher himself is missing - a physical presence in the film but little more than a mere shape, a centrepiece for a whole lot of other people's busy-ness and noise around the table.

★★☆☆☆

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Rocky III

The presence early on of Hulk Hogan as Thunderlips heightens the feeling that with this third Rocky movie you are merely watching a World Wrestling Federation-style soap opera in which alliances switch and change simply to continue the melodrama, and so Rocky aligns himself with former rival Apollo Creed, takes on new rival-in-the-ring, boxing up-and-comer Clubber Lang (Mr T), and poor Adrian begins her demise, turning into the sad onlooker she becomes in Rocky movies evermore...but then "Gonna Fly Now" starts, there's some slow-mo muscle montages, Apollo Creed appears in a crop-top, and at least for the last half hour the appeal of the original Rocky returns.

★★★☆☆

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Rocky IV (1985)

Trading in his scantily clad beach runs alongside Apollo Creed in Rocky III for runs through Soviet snowfields with his new-look goatee, Balboa heads to Russia to fight a drug-enhanced Russian giant, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) in this more-rudimentary-than-ever Rocky episode that is nine-tenths rock video training montage and only one-tenth boxing scenes cut with shots of what are quite possibly just cardboard cutouts of poor Adrian and her brother Paulie, both with nothing better to do than sadly watch on as the series inexorably worsens.

★☆☆☆☆

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Rocky (1976)

Written by and starring Sylvester Stallone, this feelgood schmaltz delivered with a grubby working class credibility introduces Rocky Balboa, a boxer with a heart of gold who would feature in seven subsequent movies, who wanders Philadelphia being called a 'creepo' and being yelled at by his trainer, best friend and the heavies who employ him until he finds Adrian, a timid pet shop store owner whom Rocky brings out of her shell and in return is boosted with a self-respect that enables him to give boxing champion Apollo Creed - and Life - a long overdue uppercut.

★★★★☆

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I, Tonya (2017)

Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding stares down the camera and announces we've reached the part of the ice-skater's life story that we've all come to the cinema to see and in fact it is at this point the movie lags and threatens to become repetitive and boring, but the details of Harding's life in the earlier stages of the movie, the question of whether Harding was complicit in the kneecapping of ice-skating rival Nancy Kerrigan, the all-round terrific performances, some neat 'how do they do it' ice-skating routines, and the dismaying idea that class injustice has pervaded even our Olympic sports, overall make I, Tonya an engrossing watch.

★★★★☆

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Moneyball (2011)

Brad Pitt continues his best Robert Redford impression since being schooled by him in Spy Games, here playing a distinctly Redfordesque Billy Beane, a real-life sabermetrician whose unconventional drafting process (based on research and analysis, not whether a player's girlfriend is hot or not) led his Oakland Athletics major league baseball team to a record-breaking winning streak in 2002.

★★★★☆

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White Men Can't Jump (1992)

A mismatched pair of grifters good at shooting hoops takes advantage of racial stereotypes to hustle money from streetball players who assume Woody Harrelson's ex-basketballer, Billy Hoyle, a white man, can't play, in this shrill, shouty and strangely very popular sports comedy drama from 1992.

★★☆☆☆

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Concussion (2015)

The story of Bennett Omalu's important work establishing the links between American football and brain injury works best as a human drama between people who prefer to 'leave things alone' versus those like Omalu who can't, and the movie offers food for thought about the ability to causally link specific behaviours to brain trauma, but the not always convincing framing of the movie as a corporate thriller and some Hollywood flourishes towards the end are a disservice to this fascinating drama.

★★★☆☆

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