Director: Cameron Crowe
Cast: Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr, Renee Zellweger, Kelly Preston, Jerry O’Connell, Jay Mohr
Jerry Maguire (Cruise) is a sports agent who is willing to do just about anything to get the best deals for his clients . However, he starts to feels uncomfortable about the business as it is now more about the money and not about the clients.
He creates a memo, voicing his doubts, for which he gets a standing ovation from his colleagues and the heave ho form his bosses.
Only one client, a moderate player for the Arizona Cardinals called Rod Tidwell (Gooding), and one colleague, Dorothy (Zellweger), a widowed accountant who has developed a crush on him, stay with him and offer to help him to rebuild his career.
The film was nominated for five Oscars, winning Gooding one for Best Supporting Actor and was the fifth Tom Cruise film in a row to make more than $100 million at the Box Office.
5. Chariots of Fire (1981) Athletics
Two men chasing dreams of glory
Director: Hugh Hudson
Cast: Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Ian Holm, Nigel Havers, Nicholas Farrell, Cheryl Campbell
A story of devotion, guts and athletic glory, with a fantastic soundtrack to boot. Chariots of Fire is the tale of the 1924 Olympic Games and two British athletes, a devout Scottish missionary and a Jewish student at Cambridge, the son of immigrants.
Both compete for their dignity: Eric Liddell (Charleson) runs in the 400 metres; Harold Abrahams (Cross), his rival at the sprint, runs to prove his worth to the anti-Semites.
The film is patriotic and class conscious, but this provides the spur for Abrahams to fight for acceptance. The prejudice is not just a question of birth or wealth, but of approach.
One of the wonderful scenes is when Abrahams discusses what drives him with his college masters, who are appalled by his deviation from the amateur ethos. "You’ve hired a professional coach, you’ve adopted a professional attitude," Lindsay Anderson says with scorn.
4. National Velvet (1944) Racing
MGM’s great technicolour heart drama
Director: Clarence Brown
Cast: Mickey Rooney, Donald Crisp, Elizabeth Taylor, Anne Revere, Angela Lansbury, Jackie Butch Jenkins
National Velvet is set during the Second World War that involves messages about courage under adversity. A 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor plays Velvet, the girl with a passion for horses who wins a spirited steed, Pi rate in a lottery.
Taylor lavishes much love on the horse and together with a vagrant former jockey named Mi Taylor (Rourke), she begins to train Pirate for the Grand National.
Known for invoking sentiment and happy feelings, the feel-good films excellence is Velvet’s single-minded determination, supported by her mother (Revere, in an Oscar-winning role).
3. Million Dollar Baby (2004) Boxing
It’s the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you
Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Jay Baruchel, Mike Colter, Lucia Rijker
There are a few directors that challenge genres better than Eastwood, and Million Dollar Baby stands out as a very unusual boxing movie, and not just because it is women focused.
As usual, Eastwood, directing his 25th film, gives himself the best part as Frankie Dunn, a devoutly Catholic boxing trainer struggling to deal with the separation of his daughter.
Dunn is given a chance for redemption when Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank), a tough but subtle fighter, arrives at his gym. She has fought well on raw talent and belief, but needs someone to believe in her and develop her potential.
Boxing is her way up in the world, "otherwise I might as well go back home, buy a used trailer and get a deep fryer", she says. Grudgingly, Frankie takes her on and the two develop a touching relationship before a life-and-death dilemma threatens to upset their world.
The film won four Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director awards and acting awards for Swank and Freeman.
2.Rocky (1976) Boxing
His whole life was a million-to-one shot
Director: John D. Avildsen
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Burgess Meredith, Thayer David
Even after 30 years after the release of Rocky, sportsmen and women around the world still go for their morning run with the theme tune blaring through their headphones
Rocky is far more than an inspirational tale about the power of the human spirit and the rise of the underdog. It is also a sensitive and powerful study of modesty.
The hero is a self-conscious mumbler, brought to life by Stallone in a performance demanding comparison with Marlon Brando in his prime. Adrian (Shire), the girl who works in the local pet shop, is shy almost to the point of muteness.
Some have interpreted Rocky’s defeat by Apollo Creed as a did to at Hollywood’s over-romanticising. He may lose the fight but he wins the girl and achieves his stated ambition of being on his feet at the final bell.
This is an undoubtedly a feel-good movie and a popular and critical triumph!
1. Raging Bull (1980) Boxing
I’m da boss, I’m da boss, I’m da boss, I’m da boss, I’m da boss...
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci, Frank Vincent, Nicholas Colasanto, Theresa Saldana, Mario Gallo, Frank Adonis, Joseph Bono, Frank Topham, Lori Anne Flax, Charles Scorsese, Don Dunphy, Bill Hanrahan, Rita Bennett
Raging Bull is not just a great film about boxing; it is a great film by any standards and, many critics indeed regard it as the best movie of the 1980s .
Its subject is Jake La Motta, a violent kid from the Bronx, who became world middleweight champion in the 1940s. But if boxing is the hub around which it revolves, its true concern is the man himself rather than simply the prize-fighter and his exploits.
Certainly his epic encounters with Sugar Ray Robinson and others are depicted in all their gory, but it is La Motta’s private life, especially his attitude towards women, that most interests the director, Scorsese, and his writers.
As portrayed, brilliantly, by De Niro, La Motta is a man of limited imagination and low self-esteem, seething with emotions that he cannot articulate. In his relationship with his wife Vickie (Moriarty) those emotions, fuelled by sexual inadequacy and lack of understanding, are mostly suspicion and jealousy, which he expresses in violence because he knows no other way.
If you’re after something that will thrill and excite you, stir your blood lust and at the same time make you think, particularly about the eternal complexity of the male-female relationship, this is not to be missed.
Invictus is released 5th February.