Sport and Cinema.com

On August 28, 1982, Cody Webster and a small group of schoolyard friends from Kirkland, Wash., sat anxiously in a dugout waiting to take the field for the championship game of the Little League World Series.

In the fall of 1993, in his prime and at the summit of the sports world, Michael Jordan walked away from pro basketball.

After leading the Dream Team to an Olympic gold medal in 1992 and taking the Chicago Bulls to their third consecutive NBA championship the following year, Jordan was jolted by the murder of his father

In a new film from Columbia Pictures being released this weekend that uses basketball as a backdrop, the real-life chemistry between the lead actors has been an easy transition to the characters they play on screen, in large part because they have known each other for years.

Out in theaters now comes this basketball-centered romantic comedy featuring Queen Latifah and Common.

Written by Michael Elliot (Like Mike, Brown Sugar), the title refers to Latifah’s character, Leslie Wright, a physical therapist and die-hard hoops fan that is simply not lucky in finding Mr. Right.

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.

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.

During a recent interview with me in Shanghai when his team was in town to play the Sharks, Parker talked a lot about movies. The native New Yorker is very passionate about cinema and has grown increasingly so, saying he spends much of his free time in China watching titles from his massive, and still growing, DVD library he has built since going there to play in the CBA.

He has played a dying baseball player, a crazy fan and won an Oscar portraying boxer Jake LaMotta, now Robert DeNiro is set in the lead role as legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi

Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock leads a group of four football films as the leading-All-American winners at the box office. The star of “The Blind Side” who portrays NFL lineman Michael Oher’s adoptive mother, teams with the director of “The Rookie” John Lee Hancock to deliver a popular picture.

In a role that carries the ball forward in a picture based on a true story, Sandra Bullock’s performance as Leigh Anne Tuohy, a gutsy, self-confident, well-off Southern woman with hyper-protective instincts garnered her an Oscar as Best Actress at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards held Sunday.