Sport and Cinema.com

In my book I stated for the record it is the best sports film of all-time, now in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of “The Hustler”, 20th Century Fox has produced a DVD worthy of its excellence. The story of Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) and his exploits with fellow pool hall gamblers is given special treatment on blu-ray.

Most film festivals seek to showcase best of the up-and-coming. Not Turner Classic Movies. The TCM Classic Film Festival is back with more than 70 screenings, as well as special introductions, guest appearances, panel discussions and other events revolving around the all-time classics of cinema.

Nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, this boxing drama, based on the real life story of Micky Ward is now out on DVD

After years of fighting to get this story of boxer brothers Dicky Eklund and Micky Ward from a hardscrabble town of Lowell, Massachusetts off the canvas, actor/producer Mark Wahlberg triumphed with The Fighter scoring a one-two punch at the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony held at Kodak Theater in downtown Los Angeles Sunday night.

The curtain has fallen on a new and compelling “television film festival”. ESPN has just concluded its opening run of thirty engaging and provocative movies, premiering 14 months ago. Meticulous and sharply observed, this “30 for 30” project has been as ambitious an undertaking as anything the network has done.

Baseball’s Midsummer Classic returns to Anaheim Tuesday for the third time since the All-Star Game began in 1933, but the event has changed quite a bit since the city first hosted the exhibition (in 1967 when the NL won in dramatic fashion on a Tony Perez home run in the 15th inning).

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.

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.

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:

And the winner is… that popular phrase is something that remains to be seen after Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Presdient Sid Ganis announced at a press conference last week, the board’s decision to expand the number of films nominated in the Best Picture category from five to ten.