After covering the genre's early history and theorizing its general characteristics, this volume then focuses on specific instances of sports films, such as the biopic, the sports history film, the documentary, the fan film, the boxing film, and explores issues such as gender, race, spectacle and silent comedy. Four major films are then closely analysed – Chariots of Fire, Field of Dreams, the Indian cricket epic Lagaan, and Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday. While recording American film's importance to the genre, the book resists the conventional over-concentration on American cinema and sports by its attention to other cinemas, for example the British, Indian, Australian, South Korean, Thai, German, New Zealand, Spanish, and so on, with the many different sports they depict.

Bruce Babington is emeritus professor of film at Newcastle University, UK. He has written, co-written and edited many books on the Hollywood, British, and New Zealand cinemas.

This volume serves as a useful primer...

Charles Barr, St. Mary's University College, Twickenham:
Within the compact format of the short cuts series, this volume does a brilliant job of packing in enough data and ideas for a long book... examining the rich and varied interactions between cinema and sport across more than a century, it is certain to have wide appeal - to students and simply to fans, of sport and film alike.