The time has come, once again, to watch hulking men hurl javelins.
Despite worries of a heat wave, a transit worker strike, possibly poisoning the competing swimmers by having races in the Seine, and the Olympic perennial—charges of corruption—the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad are a go for Paris. If it feels a little early, you aren’t nuts. It’s been only three years since Tokyo, thanks to a one-year delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (And for those of us old enough to remember, the specialness of an “Olympic year” has already been dampened a bit since the decision by the International Olympic Committee, or IOC, to split the Summer and Winter Games into two-year cycles beginning in 1994—but let’s not get into all that!) There are few stages as ripe for drama as the Olympics.
As such, the games have been exploited as a backdrop for exciting movies for decades. What’s more, the IOC has self-produced boundary-pushing official films during the Games since almost the beginning. Some are available for free on the official Olympics website, while 53 of the restored documentaries are featured in 100 Years of Olympic Films, one of the crown jewels of the Criterion Collection.
For a sudden case of Olympic fever, these 10 selections, mixing narratives and docs, are all streamable either through a subscription or a one-time fee.
1981
Chariots of Fire
directed by Hugh Hudson
The thrilling and extremely British Chariots of Fire stars Ben Cross and Ian Charleson as two runners competing in the 1924 Paris Olympics. Both are outcasts, with Cross’s Harold Abrahams overcoming antisemitic hurdles while at the University of Cambridge and Charleson’s Eric Liddell being a devout Catholic who won’t compete on Sundays. They find a camaraderie in their determination: Abrahams fighting against Britain’s rigid social structure, Liddell driven to express himself to God. The movie’s anachronistic synthesizer-led score by the great Greek composer Vangelis was an unexpected hit, mirroring, in a way, the two athletes who moved to its unprecedented beat. This movie was also at the vanguard of prestige British filmmaking of the era, bolstered by high production values, still rooted in its genteel traditions but with just a hint of self-criticism.
Consider this a challenge for film producers everywhere: We’ve yet to see a quintessential Olympics film that has, like Chariots of Fire, won cinema’s version of the gold medal—the Academy Award for best picture—in more than 40 years. (And don’t think me too foolish for saying that artistic endeavors like movies should compete with one another—did you know the Olympics had categories for sculpting, music, painting, literature, and architecture through the 1948 Games?)
1938
Olympia: Festival of the Nations and Olympia: Festival of Beauty
directed by Leni Riefenstahl
Yes, I am aware that I am, on a fundamental level, recommending to you 226 minutes of Nazi propaganda. That is unsettling. But this document of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a follow-up to Leni Riefenstahl’s fascist pep rally Triumph of the Will, is, undeniably, a work of great beauty. It requires separating the art from the artist at Olympian levels, but there are rewards to be found. (Plus you can fast-forward past the many athletes Sieg Heil-ing Adolf Hitler and go directly to Jesse Owens winning medals.)
The lengthy two-part film, which is available to stream in high definition (that YouTube clip embedded above doesn’t do it justice, but it was the best I could find), begins with a prologue of athletes shrouded in mist amid ancient Greek ruins, heroes born of marble, then literally passing the torch to modernity. From there, the film documents dozens of competitive categories (discus! hammers! rowing! diving!), deploying cinematic effects such as slow motion, acute camera angles, rewound clips, and early use of an underwater camera. Some of what you see is pure documentary footage. Other images were shot after the fact, creating an impressionistic quality to each chapter. Olympia is a remarkable artifact for cinema studies, but perhaps more striking is its importance as a primary source for history. It isn’t about the Berlin Olympics—it is the document itself.
1965
Tokyo Olympiad
directed by Kon Ichikawa
A wonderful counterpoint to Riefenstahl’s Olympia, this 168-minute epic takes an approach similar to the earlier documentary in capturing the totality of the 1964 Summer Games. It is a bold capsule of midcentury modern styles, proudly displaying modern postwar Japan in glorious color anamorphic 35 mm film. It moves chapter by chapter, offering microdramas from an array of competitions, and dazzles with close-ups and state-of-the-art post-production effects to avoid any resemblance to watching sports on television. Tokyo Olympiad swallows all of the Games whole but leaves room to focus on the marathon, in which Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila won the gold. But director Kon Ichikawa came from a narrative background—he had an international hit with the anti-war picture The Burmese Harp—and is sure to highlight the faces of the athletes who didn’t medal, too, always in ways that include them as part of the kaleidoscopic grandeur.
1968
13 Days in France
directed by Claude Lelouch and François Reichenbach
From left: French alpine skier Annie Famose and actors Anny Duperey, Odile Versois, and Claudine Auger mingle in the Olympic Village in Grenoble, France, in February 1968. Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
The warp speed with which styles and image-making can change was rarely better expressed than the four-year jump from Tokyo Olympiad to 13 Days in France. Shot with new, light handheld cameras and speedier film stocks, there’s a grainy edge to the look as well as a pop to cutting made possible from an abundance of material in the editing room. The directors chose to dismiss any attempt at narrative and simply zoom down a hill of montage, expressing the triumph, adventure, and thrill of being present in Grenoble for the 1968 Winter Games. In addition to the competitions (with figure skater Peggy Fleming winning her gold medal), there are visits to bars and cafes (this is France, after all), plus concerts (Johnny Hallyday makes an appearance), as well as general frivolity in the streets, with children hurling snowballs and everyone looking unbelievably chic. There’s not a frame of this film that isn’t absolutely gorgeous.
1993
Marathon
directed by Carlos Saura
For the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, director Carlos Saura (who had earlier made a flamenco version of Carmen starring Paco de Lucía and would later make the international hit Tango) turned his back on the all-inclusive approach and focused on just one category: the marathon through the streets of the always photogenic Catalonian city. The movie’s running time is just about the same as it takes the gold medalist to cross the finish line, but the action does cut away to other, shorter races, for both men and women. There is no narration and hardly any on-screen captioning, allowing for a fully immersive endurance test. This comes after a prologue from the extremely colorful opening ceremony with extravagant costumes and props that would make Pedro Almodóvar blush.
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2005 and 1999
Munich and One Day in September
directed by Steven Spielberg; directed by Kevin Macdonald
Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated international caper picture would be just a thrilling yarn if it weren’t based on a real-life tragedy—another chapter in the endless, bloody conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The movie begins by dramatizing the Palestinian terrorist group Black September’s successful attack against the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Games. The rest of the film—which has all the splash of a James Bond adventure but with real-world stakes—follows a Mossad team’s vendetta to assassinate the commensurate number of people (probably) involved in the killings, with a retaliatory escalation of violence. The movie, one of Spielberg’s best, is his and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s none-too-subtle commentary on “eye for an eye” countermeasures after 9/11. But it begins at—and, in a key scene, returns to—one of the darkest moments at the Olympic Games.
Scottish documentarian Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning investigation of what happened at Munich in 1972, released a few years before Spielberg’s film, goes into significantly more depth. It blends archival footage, some from news bulletins (including some from Howard Cosell, who was essentially drafted into switching from sports coverage to a hostage crisis) as well as material from the “official” Olympic film. It also, somewhat shockingly, has what were then new interviews, including commentary from one of the surviving terrorists in hiding. Its conclusions are damning, putting much of the blame on the German law enforcement who bungled the rescue attempt, and the film also points fingers at the IOC, which rather callously decided for the Games to continue while the hostages were still in danger.
2017
I, Tonya
directed by Craig Gillespie
Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya.Film still
You may need something upbeat after that double feature, so Australian director Craig Gillespie’s ripped-from-the-tabloids satire I, Tonya ought to do the trick. Starring Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding, the world’s most notorious figure skater, it details how she and her dirtbag husband, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), and his dingus buddy Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) decide that the way to Olympic glory is to maim the chief competition, Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver). This telling largely frames Harding as something of a victim herself, and, frankly, I can’t tell you how accurate that is. I can say, though, that this movie is dark, dishy, and loaded with some of the dopiest criminals outside of a Coen Brothers film. I, Tonya features some great performances, 1990s fashion, and fourth wall-breaking storytelling gimmicks. Also, yes: Harding really did once skate to ZZ Top’s sleaze-rock anthem “Sleeping Bag.”
1993
Cool Runnings
directed by Jon Turteltaub
After I, Tonya, what this list desperately needs is some positivity. I will not fib and call Cool Runnings, the Disney-produced family-friendly feature very loosely based on the first Jamaican bobsleigh team, high art. But it is loaded with a fair amount of amusing jokes and great deal of warmth. In case you’ve forgotten that this extremely PG-rated motion picture exists, it stars Leon, Doug E. Doug, Rawle D. Lewis, and Malik Yoba as the quixotic bobsleigh team entering the 1988 Winter Games from Jamaica, a locale not particularly known for its snow. John Candy plays their “why me?” coach, and there’s a lot of shouting and crashing and merriment. Do not, under any circumstances, research how true to reality this picture is (hint: not very), but instead revel in the pleasant vibes. One for the whole family!
2015 and 1969
Eddie the Eagle and Downhill Racer
directed by Dexter Fletcher; directed by Michael Ritchie
A spiritual successor to Cool Runnings is the relatively recent British comedy Eddie the Eagle, starring Taron Egerton as Michael Edwards, known to many as “Eddie the Eagle,” a never-say-die sort of chap who self-trains as a ski jumper and, by sheer determination, ends up at the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. Does he come in dead last? Yes, he does. Does he still win the hearts of his compatriots? Well, how many other movies about Olympic ski jumpers have you seen?
To complement Eddie the Eagle, there’s Robert Redford in one of his early masterpieces, Downhill Racer. Filmed at around the same time as 13 Days in France (and sharing a similar shooting style), this extremely focused look at competitive skiing, from the amateur circuit to the Olympics, is one of the all-time great fly-on-the-wall movies of the era, plunging you directly into a hermetically sealed world with a near-monastic fanaticism to a specific craft. It has one of the great unbalanced endings typical of the period (it’s the same ending Redford and director Michael Ritchie used in their follow-up, The Candidate) and helped cement Redford as one of the top stars of New Hollywood. Roger Ebert famously called it the “best movie ever made about sports—without really being about sports at all.” It is the only movie on this list that isn’t “based on a true story,” though Oakley Hall, the author of the novel from which the movie was adapted, and Redford did take inspiration from different real-life competitive skiers.
For bonus trivia: Here is a peek into how studio filmmaking works. When producers were trying to squeeze a movie out of the Jamaican bobsleigh story in the early 1990s, one of the people they called on to take a stab at it was Ritchie, despite being completely different in tone. “Hey, this guy did something about skiing 20 years ago—he must know a thing or two!” As such, he has a shared “story by” credit on Cool Runnings.
2023
The Boys in the Boat
directed by George Clooney
Not one of the narrative films I’ve mentioned since Chariots of Fire has been purely about good guys who are also Olympic champions, so I want to close this one out right. Moreover, I’d like to further wash the taste of Riefenstahl’s Olympia from my mouth, even if it does have gorgeous cinematography. Save us, George Clooney, with your by-the-numbers, old-school, slightly boring but mostly agreeable picture The Boys in the Boat. Do you know the story of the underdog rowing team from the University of Washington that didn’t just beat all the snobs from the Ivy League but went to Berlin and splashed cold water in the face of Hitler? Well, you will after watching this unfairly overlooked recent winner.