This book rethinks the discussion of sport as a cinematic subject. Arguing for the vitality of the sports film as distinctively modern genre, the book looks at its innovative potential to capture twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport in all its complexity. Written in an accessible style and illustrated throughout, the book integrates work and ideas from film studies with thinking from sports psychology, philosophy, data theory and ecocriticism. In its detailed analyses of a wide-ranging group of films, the book shows how film, from fictional works to biopics to experimental documentaries, can illuminate individual sporting experience, as well as sports wider place in modern life.

Neil Archer is Senior Lecturer in Film at Keele University (UK). He is the author of eight previous books, including Twenty-First-Century Hollywood: Rebooting the System (2019) and The Social Network: Youth Film 2.0 (2022).