The 12 best football movies ever made

On February 8, 2025By Littum

Based on a novel of the actual Dallas Cowboys player Peter Gent, North Dalla’s forty is apparently a comedy with Nick Nolte as Gent’s stand-in Phil Elliott, an aging footballer with mounting damage, an irreverent attitude and an allipresent cigarette hanging from his lips. But it is less grinning-sounding fun than a fascinating time capsule in an earlier year NFL, where the corruption, cynicism and the overall bad vibber do not feel as smooth business, but still succeeds in busting the players’ lives pretty well. “They are the team,” Elliott says later in the film, gesticulating against the suits when he rejects a prayer against the team. “We’re equipped!” Twenty years later, another movie on this list would give a broader look at similar trouble-players down the painkillers, greedy owners, massive pressure to succeed at any price-but that is lived in sweating to North Dalla’s forty (Seriously, you’ve never seen so many beers and cigarettes in a weight room), especially thanks to Nolte in the early film star mode, plus a good character actor support from Charles Durning and Dabney Coleman.

All the right traits (1983)

If there are questions about why Varsity Blues Is not on this list (and really, there should not be), it is partly because it is essentially the same movie as this one – except this one has a young empty cruise. He plays a bigger Pittsburgh High School Quarterback, desperate to get out of his dying steel mill town, but also know that football can do much more for his college views than a B-average. His coach (Craig T. Nelson) has similar designs on Escape, which runs to put them on a collision course. Instructed by long -time kinematographer Michael Chapman (who shot Taxi driver. Furious bull. The last detailand They lost boysAmong other things; His kinematographer here, Jan de Bont, went on Speed) All the right traits is a great movie, on and off the football field. So many modern films are digitally muted to look like they have been shot in cloudy weather; Chapman and De Bont make Pennsylvanian-Triesty feel more lived and melancholically beautiful, and the one central game made in length is exciting and tactile. The film is also in advance about sadness and transactional nature of high school football in a small town – it is satisfactorily aware that these jocks are both humans and dipshit teenage boys – and only really bursts at the end where it can’t quite appear out of one Satisfactory realistic ending that would not be pure misery. What it lands on instead feels a little too easy, but until that time fits the title.

Jerry Maguire (1996)