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The 15 Best Olympics Movies, Ranked
From Personal Best to Blades of Glory.
The Jamaican bobsled team make up the perfectly charming underdogs, your proverbial frozen fish out of ocean water, but this movie’s secret weapon is John Candy, showing a certain gravitas later in his career as the grizzled coach with a dark past and a chance at redemption. Its backstory is almost as famous as the film itself: German director Leni Riefenstahl, after wowing Adolf Hitler with her expert piece of Nazi propaganda Triumph of the Will, got the go-ahead to make a movie about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, which was meant to celebrate her homeland’s athletic superiority. Chronicling the same tragedy alluded to in Munich, Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning documentary could be seen as a precursor to ESPN’s “30 for 30” nonfiction formula, combining archival news footage and contemporary interviews to re-create a pivotal sports moment while offering a modern perspective on those events.
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