Though we've left out some sentimental choices — cry us a river over "Brian's Song" another time — we're confident that you'll discover some new favorites
Set in Bloomington, Ind., Peter Yates’ (Bullitt) Breaking Away stars Dennis Christopher as Dave Stoller, a local high school grad obsessed with all things Italian, most important, bike racing. He and his pals, played by Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern and Jackie Earle Haley, are all trying to figure out what to do with their lives. In the short term, they set out to win the annual “Little Indy” team cycle race, as much to stick it to the rich college boys (who call them cutters, a literal reference to their blue-collar fathers who cut the stones that make up the university buildings) as to feel a sense of achievement. Optimism abounds in Steve Tesich’s script, which won an Oscar for Best Screenplay. And, as with all the best sports movies, you don’t have to think too hard to figure out the metaphor on display: the smoothness (or roughness) of the ride relates to both cycling and life.
Walt Whitman called baseball “our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.” Anyway, that’s the close paraphrase of Whitman’s panegyric by Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), a keen student of the game and its minor-league players in Durham, N.C., and one of the most liberated, lubricious females in the history of movies — certainly of sports movies, where the usual function of females is to stand at ringside or courtside and cheer their men on. Groupies in America’s former national pastime are known as baseball Annies, of which this Annie is the glorious apotheosis. Each spring, she auditions new players from the Durham Bulls before taking one as a beau for the season. The finalists: Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), a former major leaguer playing out the string, and Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLouch (Tim Robbins), a young comer with a 100-m.p.h. fastball but no discipline, on the field or in bed. It’s Annie’s job to teach him the secret of outdoor and indoor sports: that “making love is like hitting a baseball. You just gotta relax and concentrate.”
Writer-director Ron Shelton, once a minor-league player, knows the subtleties of this strange game with no clock and the defense (the pitcher) in charge of the ball. So does Annie. “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time,” she observes, “but it’s also a job.” If Nuke is to make a career of his natural gift, he needs Crash — his catcher and competitor for Annie’s affections — to help him. Bull Durham was the first of Costner’s three baseball movies, followed by the elegiac, some would say sappy, Field of Dreams and, a decade later, For the Love of the Game. But this wry comedy is the one with all the magic, and a mature understanding of a million kids’ lifelong pursuit.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
