Sport and Cinema.com

As part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” film initiative celebrating the network’s 30th anniversary comes this documentary from rapper-turned-filmmaker Ice Cube. The program debuts on ESPN Tuesday at 8pm ET.

YELL FOR CADEL goes behind the scenes at the Tour de France to reveal how a world class cyclist – Australian Cadel Evans, the recent winner of the World Championships – prepares for the world’s toughest bike race.

Staging its first film festival and in such historic settings as Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian Theaters along Hollywood Boulevard now through Sunday, Turner Classic Films, the American broadcast authority on classic cinema, is celebrating some of the best movies ever made.

One of major league baseball’s oldest franchises gets some well-earned exposure on DVD as this multi-disc set presents four television broadcasts of games that are representative of the pride between Tiger fans and their ball club.

Rob Siegel, the writer of the Oscar-nominated drama, The Wrestler, writes and makes his directorial debut in this small, but exceptional and thought-provoking tale on obsessive behavior through the prism of sports – in this case NFL football.

With good reviews on the film festival circuit and a theatrical release, the boxing documentary “Facing Ali” is now available for home entertainment as a single disc DVD from Lionsgate.

Muhammad Ali, the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion and Olympic gold medalist who electrified the world with his unorthodox style and charismatic ways, is paid tribute by ten of his acclaimed rivals.

As we begin 2010 it is time to consider which is the BEST sports movie from the first decade of the 21st Century.

There are some very good choices. Documentaries, by the way, like “Dogtown and Z-Boys” deserve their own column.

Here is the Top Ten:

More than 30 years after the original motion picture, “Rocky” continues to be recognized as a film icon and American hero where a “nobody” becomes a “somebody”. This definitive collection that features Sylvester Stallone as Philadelphia club fighter Rocky Balboa includes each film version as well as a bonus disc with hours of documentaries, interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and a new trivia game.

In one of his earliest starring roles, Robert Redford gives a memorable portrait of an inarticulate, self-absorbed, but gifted world class skier obsessed with being the best, no matter the cost.
Taking on the sport’s best downhillers on the circuits of Europe with dreams of Olympic glory, David Chappellet’s (Redford) selfish clashes with his U.S. national team coach (Gene Hackman) can be summed up when he tells him, “I ski fast and that’s all there is to it”.

This beautifully-packaged, digitally preserved celebration of the Fall Classic is a magnificent collection of all the drama and unforgettable moments of the World Series.

Encased in a hardcover book that includes a 58-page pictorial retrospective going back to the event’s origins in 1903, are 65 films on 20 DVDs representing nearly 50 hours of restored and newly digitized masters going back to 1943.