Top five: Greatest sports movies of all time

Focusing on the thrilling rivalry between Brazilian
F1 legend Ayrton Senna and his arch-rival Alain Prost, Asif Kapadia's documentary delves deep into the motivations of the protagonists of one of the greatest rivalries ever seen in Formula One - and perhaps sport as a whole.

And even though it has yet to go on general release the film is already drawing rave reviews which are praising it for brilliantly capturing the enigmatic
spirit of a genuine sporting legend.

So with that in mind we decided
to run down our list of the five greatest sports movies of all time - but first
a few rules.

Basically, to stop boxing
films from dominating the list, we have decided to have a 'one sport, one film'
rule.

Also, we admit a
reluctance to include silly comedies. Harsh? Of course, but it is just too hard
to compare the merits of something like Caddyshack
to Any Given Sunday, even if they
are both super films in their own way.

However, despite being
very good, and eligible, Any Given Sunday is not good enough to make our list
or indeed is any American football movie (Friday Night Lights is our
favourite).

Football films,
likewise, have often failed, primarily (it seems to us) for the sheer
difficulty in filming convincing on-field action in such a free-flowing sport. The Damned United - the story of Brian
Clough's doomed spell at Leeds - came very close to forcing its way into the
top five, however, and was unlucky to miss out..

Also missing selection
is baseball, despite producing gems like Bull Durham, The Natural and the Pride of the Yankees - and even Field
of Dreams, for those who like their sugar served up with a side plate of saccharine.
Other worthwhile efforts such as The Hustler, Hoosiers, Seabiscuit and the cheesy-yet-masterful
Cool Runnings also miss out.

For the record, if we had
been going for cheesy-fun rather than classic brilliance then Cool Runnings would have been on the list. That alternative top five would also include
Happy Gilmore (iconic enough to have
become part of the golfing lexicon), Escape to Victory (how can you ignore Pele beating the Nazis with an overhead kick?),
Heaven Can Wait (the brilliant 1978 film
starring Warren Beatty and James Mason), and Kingpin (forget Bill Murray's Lost in Translation Oscar snub, this
is the one he should have won prizes for).

With that said, here's
our list of the five greatest sports films of all time.

- - - -

Wait, I thought we said
no comedies? Well, yes we did but Slap Shot is so much more than a mere comedy,
despite containing some of the most brilliant slapstick humour ever committed
to celluloid. Paul Newman teamed up once again with George Roy Hill - his
director for The Sting, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - to illustrate
life in the minor hockey leagues.

A small-town team is on
the verge of going bust but player-coach Newman turns things around after
recruiting the ultra-violent (and stupid) Hanson Brothers. Full of bad
language, violence and great scenes Slap Shot is unashamedly a 'bloke's movie'...
and a bloody marvellous one at that.

The iconic opening scene
alone would be enough to merit this film's inclusion in the list: the
slow-motion shots of runners' feet kicking up the sand in a training run, all set
to the brilliant music of Vangelis, is one of the most famous sequences in
cinematic history.

Thankfully, the rest of film
delivers on that promise. It tells the true story of the rivalry between Jew
Harold Abrahams and devout Christian Eric Liddell as they compete for glory at
the 1924 Paris Olympics, but the film is imbued with fascinating period detail,
characters and side-stories that it grips all the way through to the
edge-of-the-seat races at the climax.

It became the only
non-boxing sports film to win a Best Picture at the Oscars, famously prompting
screenwriter Colin Welland to yell out "The British are coming!" at
the top of his voice in his acceptance speech. He might have been largely wrong
about that, but no doubt he'd take the consolation prize of the film he penned remaining
a classic nearly 30 years later.

Richard Harris's first
leading role and one of his most memorable. He was awarded the Best Acting
prize at Cannes and also nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Frank
Machin - a rugby league player in gritty 1960s Northern England - whose
successes on the pitch contrast markedly with his ultimately doomed, romantic
relationship with his widowed landlady off it.

A fantastic film that
constantly bubbles with an undercurrent of resentment and bitterness; it is not
an easy or light-hearted watch, but then again, great films rarely are.

A nearly three-hour-long
documentary covering the basketball dreams of a couple of poverty stricken
African-American kids in inner-city Chicago over a five-year period might not
sound like a gripping watch, but there can be few films that contain as much
tension, emotion, grit and edge-of-your-seat drama as Hoop Dreams.

In a year
that produced films such as Pulp Fiction, the Shawshank Redemption and Forrest
Gump, Hoop Dreams was selected in more critics' top 10 lists than any other
film released in 1994.

Once the film is
finished you will be racing to your computer to find out what happened to the
characters once the camera stopped rolling, such is the film's power and the
emotional attachment you ultimately feel for the two main protagonists.

When We Were Kings, The
Champ, Million Dollar Baby, Cinderella Man, Body and Soul, and of course Rocky
(but not so much the sequels) - as we said earlier, this list could easily have
become an all-boxing affair.

However, 1980 Jack La
Motta bio-pic Raging Bull takes our top spot with greats like Martin Scorsese,
Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci working together masterfully at the height of
their careers to produce a cinematic gem. De Niro is simply stunning in the
role of La Motta, as he morphs from boxing champ into washed-up nightclub owner;
Pesci's sparkles as his fast-talking brother and manager; while Scorsese has
never again directed such a visually impressive picture.

The decision to forgo a
modern score for the work of Italian composer Pietro Mascagni was the final
piece of the jigsaw - the opening sequence of De Niro shadow boxing to
Cavalleria Rusticana draws you in superbly and the rest of the film never lets
you go. All told - a masterpiece.