![]() Leon Gast traveled to Zaire in 1974 to capture the Rumble in the Jungle bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, and then spent almost 20 years pursuing funding to complete his film. A documentary detailing his victories would be exciting enough, but Kapadia’s ability to encapsulate an athlete’s life simply through his deeds and achievements elevates this film beyond the genre. Senna stands out as a fascinating, exceptionally talented man whose passion for motorsport was not always reciprocated by institutions more concerned with the show than safety. Asif Kapadia’s picture of the champion racer draws on home movies, press briefings, off-screen conversations and fly-on-the-wall film from the driving seat to piece together a turbulent career, including fierce rivalry with former colleague and French driver Alain Prost. He died in an accident at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994. In the 1980s and 90s, Brazil’s Ayrton Senna was a national hero and the most photogenic driver on the Formula One circuit. The TV show may have surpassed the film at this point, but the components that made the series great – interpersonal relationships, small-town sports mania, and nail-biting gridiron drama – were fully developed well before the small-screen adaptation began waxing lyrical about clear eyes and full hearts. How do you show all the real-life dirt and journalistic details without losing the need for drama in a sports movie? Director Peter Berg found the solution by mixing documentary-inspired handheld camerawork with the soaring emotions of the players’ life off the field, and then grounding the entire production with a rock-solid portrayal from Billy Bob Thornton as an emotionally involved coach. It was never going to be simple to adapt Buzz Bissinger’s nonfiction story of one season with a high school football team from Odessa, Texas. From boxing dramas to bowling comedy, surfing documentaries to slobs-versus-snobs bouts on the links, waste hoops showdowns to ninth-inning baseball standoffs, here are some of the best sports films of all time.
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