With the XXV Winter Olympics in Milano-Cortina coming to an end, Cinema Paradiso steps in to cure those withdrawal symptoms with the final part of its Brief (ahem) History of those films made about the events that have kept sports fans gripped for the last 19 days.
In Part One, we looked at the official films that have been made on behalf of the International Olympic Committee between Chamonix 1924 and Beijing 2022. We also took to the slopes to recall the great skiing movies from the silent Bergfilme produced in Weimar Germany to those comedies and dramas set on and off the piste at the most popular ski resorts in Europe and North America.
The focus in Part Two fell on such ice events as figure and speed skating, ski jumping, bobsledding, and curling. Now, we turn to the most bruising of any Olympic sport, ice hockey, and snowboarding, which has done so much to bring a younger audience to the Winter Games that are increasingly under threat from global warming.
Pucker Up
The Winnipeg Falcons took on the world and won gold at the 1920 Summer Games in Antwerp. Chosen at short notice to represent Canada in the first Olympic tournament, the team won its three matches by a combined score of 29-1. But it was the Toronto Granites who defended Canada's crown in Chamonix in 1924, when GB managed to come third before stopping the Canuck winning streak by taking a surprise gold at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936.
This was the year that Noel M. Smith's King of Hockey was released, telling the story of a college rookie (Dick Purcell) who goes blind after being struck on the head with the stick of a jealous pro-leaguer (Wayne Morris). John Wayne (Idol of the Crowds) and Rita Hayworth (The Game That Kills, both 1937) featured in films with an ice hockey theme before Louis Hayward's Cambridge rugby blue took to the rink in Alfred E. Green's The Duke of West Point (1938) and British comedian Claude Hulbert got mistaken in Switzerland for a star hockey player in Alfred J. Goulding's Olympic Honeymoon (1940). Allan 'Rocky' Lane plays a Duluth Rustlers ace who is groomed for movie stardom in Gay Blades (1946), while Stanley Clements defies the gangsters bribing the Red Devils into going on a losing streak in White Lightning (1953).
Ice hockey virtually disappeared from US screens for the next two decades and few would have seen Vyacheslav Shalevich strive to prove that 30 isn't too old to succeed in Raphael Goldin's Soviet flick, The Hockey Players (1965).
Novelist Erich Segal enlisted a former classmate to help with the ice hockey sequences in Arthur Hiller's Love Story (1970), which charted the campus romance of Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O'Neal) and Jennifer Cavalieri (Ali MacGraw). Bill and Bob Cleary had been part of the US team that had won a shock gold at the 1960 Games in Squaw Valley, with Bill going on to coach the team at Harvard, where Segal had studied with Bob (and future actor Tommy Lee Jones). In the film, Bob plays the referee in the hockey sequences, while Bill doubles for O'Neal in the long shots.
Star names from 10 National Hockey League teams cameo in Face Off (1971), in which Art Hindle plays a Toronto Maple Leafs rookie whose day job risks alienating singer girlfriend, Trudy Young. Keir Dullea is another fish out of water in Paperback Hero (1973), as he drops down the leagues to play for a no-hope team in a small Saskatchewan town. This isn't to be confused with the 1998 Australian film of the same name, which stars Hugh Jackman as a trucker with a secret life as a romantic novelist.
A Rust Belt town in Pennsylvania provides the setting for George Roy Hill's Slap Shot (1977), which has a fair claim to being the best ice hockey film ever made. Screenwriter Nancy Dowd based her script on the experiences of her brother, Ned Dowd, who had played in the minor leagues. Headlining what he frequently called his favourite film, Paul Newman relishes the role of Reggie Dunlop (which had been coveted by Al Pacino), the player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs, who recruits bruiser brothers Jeff and Steve Hanson to rough up opponents in order to transform the team's fortunes. They were played by Jeff and Steve Carlson, who were teammates on the Jamestown Jets with Dowd, who guested as pugnacious Syracuse Bulldogs rookie, Ogie Ogilthorpe. The Hansons returned for the long-delayed and inevitably disappointing sequels, Steve Boyum's Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice (2002) and Richard Martin's Slap Shot 3: The Junior League (2008), which respectively starred Steven Baldwin as the new player-coach and Leslie Nielsen, as the mayor, alongside NHL legends, Mark Messier and Doug Gilmour.
While Slap Shot played violence in the sport for yuks, Robert Markowitz's The Deadliest Season (1977), took the problem much more seriously, as Meryl Streep stands by minor league defenceman Michael Moriarty after he is charged with killing an opponent on the ice. This teleplay would hold its own on disc, as would Steven Hilliard Stern's Miracle on Ice (1981), which was rushed out to mark the remarkable defeat of the all-conquering Soviets at Lake Placid by the US team coached by former player Herb Brooks (Karl Malden), who owed much to net minder Jim Craig (Steve Guttenberg), who had the game of his life against the Red Machine. When Gavin O'Connor helmed Miracle (2004) for Disney, Kurt Russell took over as Brooks, who had been replaced in the 1960 squad by Bob Cleary, who was chosen solely because brother Bill refused to play without him.
Bristling with Brat Pack attitude, Peter Markle's Youngblood (1986) has teen skating sensation Dean Youngblood (Rob Lowe) try his hand at ice hockey with amateur Canadian outfit, the Hamilton Mustangs. However, he soon discovers that pretty boys are cut no slack in this brawny sport, especially when the rival Thunder Bay Bombers come calling. But with star player Derek Sutton (Patrick Swayze) injured, someone has to step up for the Memorial Cup showdown. Facing up to responsibility is also the message of Robert Mandel's Touch and Go (1986), as Chicago Eagles star Bobby Barbato (Michael Keaton) discovers how tough life can be on the South Side for people like Denise Canno (Maria Conchita Alonso), the mother of the kid whose gang had mugged him.
Only one film in Hollywood history has led to the formation of an actual ice hockey team. as Disney founded the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim as a result of the boffo box office for Stephen Herek's The Mighty Ducks (1992). When cocky Minneapolis lawyer Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez) is given a community service sentence for drink driving, he is forced to confront his own past, as the Pee-Wee Ice Hockey League team he has been given to coach is beaten 17-0 by the Hawks, led by Jack Reilly (Lane Smith), who had chewed out Bombay as a kid for missing an overtime penalty in a big game. However, Charlie Conway (Joshua Jackson) and his fellow Ducks teach Bombay a few lessons by rebelling against his pragmatic tactics. The nucleus of the team find themselves in Los Angeles as part of the US squad at the Junior Goodwill Games in Sam Weissman's D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994). But the Hollywood lifestyle distracts Bombay from his goal and takes a job with the Games organisers at the start of Robert Liberman's D3: The Mighty Ducks (1996), which sees ex-NHL player Ted Orion (Jeffrey Nordling) take the reins, just as Charlie and his pals take up scholarships at the prestigious school where Bombay had once been a pupil.
Anger issues drive Adam Sandler away from ice hockey into golf in Dennis Dugan's Happy Gilmore (1996). But the action remains on the ice in Louis Saia's Les Boys (1997), a box-office behemoth that reflects Québec fixation with the sport and spawned three sequels (1998, 2001, and 2005), with the latter duo pitching the ragtag team against the Canadian women's Olympic squad and the French Legends, which provides an excuse for casting lots of famous faces. Less commercially successful, but still amusing is Jean-Philippe Toussaint's The Ice Rink (1998), which stars Bruce Campbell as an actor who travels to France to make an ice hockey film for director Tom Novembre and falls for assistant Mireille Perrier at the facility managed by Jean-Pierre Cassel.
David E. Kelley was behind the screenplay for Jay Roach's Mystery, Alaska (1999), which sees Mayor Colm Meaney replace Judge Burt Reynolds with Sheriff Russell Crowe as the coach of a small-town ice hockey team shortly before the New York Rangers come to play an exhibition game on the local pond. However, with several players landing in trouble, getting a team on the ice proves something of a problem. Another dubious deal is struct in Randall Miller's Disney teleplay, H-E Double Hockey Sticks (which can be read as HEX or HELL), as Satan (Rhea Perlman) sends a junior devil named Griffelkin (Will Friedle) to persuade ice hockey star Dave Heinrich (Matthew Lawrence) into trading his soul for a Delaware Demons victory over the Annapolis Angels in the Stanley Cup final.
The House of Mouse was also behind Rod Daniel's Genius (1999), in which 12 year-old science geek Trevor Morgan assumes a new identity in order to be accepted by classmates like Emmy Rossum, whose father coaches the school's Northern Lights hockey team. He gets into trouble for inventing a gizmo to win games, but the mayhem is even loopier in Robert Vince's MVP: Most Valuable Primate (2000), as the Nuggets get a hand in the Harvest Cup against the Calgary Polar Bears when a chimpanzee named Jack (who was taught sign language by a doting scientist) turns out to be a hockey whizz.
We're back at Disney for Francine McDougall's Go Figure (2005), which takes promising figure skater Jordan Hinson to an exclusive school on an ice hockey scholarship, where she proves to be a natural with a stick in her hand. An all-women's hockey league prompts millionaire Jon Bon Jovi to max out several credit cards in Arthur Hiller's National Lampoon's Pucked (2006). However, his scheme is jeopardised when he's charged with fraud. The crime is murder in Érik Canuel's Bon Cop, Bad Cop (2006), as Toronto detective Martin Ward (Colm Feore) is paired with Québécois David Bouchard (Patrick Huard) when a series of victims connected to the world of Canadian ice hockey are found dead with telltale tattoos. The mismatched duo would be reunited by Alain DesRochers for Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 (2017), which links a chop shop to a terrorist plot.
Toronto also provides the backdrop for Marco Schnabel's The Love Guru (2008), in which Maurice Pitka (Mike Myers) is hired by Maples Leafs owner, Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba), to help star player Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) regain the form lost when his wife ran off with Los Angeles Kings goal minder, Jacques 'Le Coq' Grandé (Justin Timberlake). Mauled by the critics, this earned Myers Golden Raspberry Awards for both his performance and his screenplay, as the film took Worst Picture - which, of course, is a rousing recommendation to rent it right away!
Who also wouldn't want to see Olivia Newton John as the home-schooling mom of timid teen Noah Reid, who discovers a talent for dishing it out on the ice for the Brampton Blades in Michael McGowan's Score: A Hockey Musical (2010) ? It's hard to believe this cornball curio isn't on disc, but Cinema Paradiso can bring you Michael Lembeck's equally offbeat comedy, Tooth Fairy (2010), which explains how hard nut hockey star, Derek Thompson (Dwayne Johnson), who is renowned for sending opponents to the dentist, is punished for being a dream crusher by the head of the tooth fairies, Lily (Julie Andrews), who entrusts him to hapless case manager, Tracy (Stephen Merchant).
Disney's enduring love of hockey stories brings us to Mark L. Taylor's Den Brother (2010), which follows high school hockey ace, Alex Pearson (Hutch Dano), as he assumes the identity of one Mrs Zamboni in order to run his younger sister's Bumble Bee scout troupe, which is having a cookie drive. And another grumpy father dictates the action inBreakaway (2011), as Sikh-Canadian Vinay Virmani defies orders to try out for the Hammerheads hockey team. When they turn him down on spurious grounds, rink owner Dan Winters (Rob Lowe) agrees to coach a new team, the Speedy Singhs.
The Halifax Highlanders are the team in need of a boost in Michael Dowse's Goon (2011), which was based on the autobiography of minor leaguer, Doug Smith. So, Pat Hoolihan (Jay Baruchel), the presenter of the Hot Ice public access highlights show, recruits doltish bouncer, Doug 'The Thug' Glatt (Seann William Scott), to flex his muscles on the ice for the upcoming showdown with the St John's Shamrocks, led by their fabled enforcer, Ross 'The Boss' Rhea (Liev Schreiber). Eugene Levy steals scenes effortlessly as the disapproving Dr Glatt, but he couldn't be persuaded to appear in Baruchel's sequel, Goon: Last of the Enforcers (2017), which sees The Thug come out of retirement to protect the team from its new hard man, Anders Cain (Wyatt Russell).
Werner Herzog is among the producers of Gabe Polsky's Red Army (2014). a compelling documetary that focusses on Viacheslav Fetisov, the dual Olympic gold medalist who left CSKA Moscow at the height of the Cold War and defected to the West, along with Vladimir Konstantinov, Slava Kozlov, Sergei Fedorov, and Igor Larionov, who formed the famous Russian Five who took the Detroit Red Wings to consecutive Stanley Cup finals.
If you only rent one Winter Sports film from Cinema Paradiso, it has to be this one. We'd also love to be able to bring you Joshua Riehl's version of events, The Russian Five (2018). But it's currently unavailable, along with Kim Jong-hyun's Take Off 2 (2016) and Aleksi Mäkelä's 95 (2017), which respectively deal with South Korea's first woman's national ice hockey team and the 1995 World Championship triumph of Finland's women. Also out of reach are Jay Karas's Disney comedy, The Swap, in which teenage figure skater Peyton List changes bodies with ice hockey player, Jacob Bertrand; Kevan Funk's Hello Destroyer (both 2016), which sees a junior enforcer's life change when he hits an opponent too hard on the ice; Ahockalypse (2018), which sees zombies stop play after a championship final; and Indian Horse (2017), the story of a 1970s First Nations boy, who graduates from The Moose reservation team to the minor league outfit, the Toronto Monarchs, only for his career to be blighted by racism. Clint Eastwood executive produces.
Sibling rivalry dominates the 'Lisa on Ice' episode (1994) of The Simpsons (1989-), as Lisa becomes the goalie for Apu's Kwik-E-Mart Gougers in a big showdown with Chief Wiggum's The Mighty Pigs, whose star player is Bart. Dealing with the emotions that sporting intensity can generate is also the theme of Kelsey Mann's Inside Out 2 (2024), as 13 year-old Riley Andersen forgets who her friends are when she goes to hockey camp and Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger find themselves having to deal with new roommates, Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, Ennui, and Nostalgia.
Recent hockey pictures like Odd Man Rush (2020), Heavenly Team (2021), The Late Game, and Phantom of the Ice (both 2024) are rather hard to pin down. So, we'll end with a pair of Canadian series that have caught the public imagination. Created by writer and star, Jared Keeso, Shoresy (2022) follows the shifting fortunes of the Sudbury Bulldogs after they suffer 20 straight defeats in the Northern Ontario Senior Hockey Organisation (NOSHO). Despite having seen better days, Shoresy promises owner Nat (Tasya Teles) that the team will never lose again if he is given control, along with coach Sanguinet (Harlan Blayne Kytwayhat). With hockey icon Wayne Gretzky among the guest stars, this lampoon of locker-room machismo and sporting cliché feels like a companion piece to the US soccer comedy collected into Ted Lasso: The Richmond Way (2023). But there's nothing quite like Jacob Tierney's Heated Rivalry (2025), which has amassed a cult following, as it chronicles the burgeoining, but furtive relationship between Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), the Japanese-Canadian skipper of the Montreal Metros, and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), the Russian captain of Major League rivals, the Boston Raiders. Based on the Game Changer series of books by Rachel Reid, Season One became a sensation because of its 14 explicit sex scenes. It's due out on disc soon, so watch this space...
Snurfers Stoked on Alley-Oops
In 1965, Sherm Poppen fastened two 36-inch wooden skiis together to form a board on which he could tow his daughters down the slopes near Muskegon, Michigan. Wife Nancy dubbed the board a 'snurfer' (from 'snow' and 'surfer') and it became so popular with local kids that Poppen licenced his invention and half a million snurf boards were sold over the next year. Suitably inspired, Tom Sims and Jake Burton Carpenter developed their own 'snowboards' and the first competitions were held from the mid-1970s, with the first World Cup taking place in Austrian in 1985. Just 13 years later, snowboarding became part of the Winter Olympic programme at Nagano. with Canada's Ross Rebagliati and France's Karine Ruby becoming the first gold medalists. Six disciplines are now contested at each Games: the giant slalom; the halfpipe; snowboard cross; slopestyle; big air; and parallel slalom.
'Sidewalk surfing' had developed in parallel with snowboarding and film-makers had latched on to skateboarding after it became an urban craze, as Stacy Peralta recalled in the classic documentary, Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001). While the likes of Scott Dittrich's Freewheelin' (1976), George Gage's Skateboard (1978), and Julian Pena's Skateboard Madness (1980) appealed to niche audiences, Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future (1985) put skateboarding on the mainstream map and the likes of David Winters's Thrashin' (1986), Graeme Clifford's Gleaming the Cube (1989), Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (2007), Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014), Crystal Moselle's Skate Kitchen, and Jonah Hill's Mid90s (both 2018) have followed in their wheel tracks, along with such landmark actualities as Tristan Patterson's Dragonslayer, Peralta's Bones Brigade: An Autobiography (both 2011), and Bing Liu's deeply poignant, Minding the Gap (2018).
Snowboarding has yet to achieve a similar cinematic profile. But the sub-genre has come a long way since Jim Varney blundered into the ski resort in John Sheppird's indie comedy, Snowboard Academy (1997), which saw siblings Corey Haim and Paul Hopkins (one a snowboarder, the other a skier) compete for the right to join the local snow patrol. A women's skiing competition is interrupted in Stanley Tong's Mr Magoo (1997), as Luanne 'The Black Widow' LeSeur (Kelly Lynch) escapes on a snowmobile having stolen a ruby from an auction and the myopic Quincy Magoo (Leslie Nielsen) gives chase on an ironing board, which we are going to claim as a makeshift snowboard.
Teenage surfer Johnny 'Pono' Kapahala (Brandon Baker) is forced to leave the champion grandpa after whom he was named (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) in Hawaii after his father is transferred to Vermont in Steve Boyum's Johnny Tsunami (1999). He finds himself in the middle of a class-based stand-off between the private school Skies and the public school Urchins, who prefer snowboarding to skiing. Guess which gang Pono winds up with in a Disney drama that was accorded a sequel, Eric Bross's Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board (2010), which brings our hero home to show off the skills on the water that he had acquired on the slopes. Maybe they would impress such icons as Todd Richards, Rio Tahara, Tara Dakides, Devun Walsh, and Rob 'Sluggo' Boyce, who guest in the debuting Brendan and Emmett Malloy's Out Cold (2001), which joins Alaskan snowboarding slackers Rick (Jason London) and Luke (Zach Galifianakis) in their efforts to prevent sleazy developer John Majors (Lee Majors) turn their Bull Mountain playground into a chic ski resort.
Extreme sports got a substantial screen boost when Vin Diesel took on the role of Xander Cage, the daredevil athlete who is recruited by the National Security Agency in Rob Cohen's xXx (2002) and finds himself parachuting from a plane on a skateboard in order to sabotage the Anarchy 99 communication tower. That he survived being captured is evident by the existence of two sequels, Lee Tamahori's xXx: State of the Union (2005) and D.J. Caruso's xXx: Return of Xander Cage (2017), which are available from Cinema Paradiso - perhaps in a trilogy that takes advantage of our 'extra' disc rental policy. Further adrenaline rushes are provided by Christian Duguay's Extreme Ops (2002), when British director, Ian (Rufus Sewell), hires snowboarders Chloe (Bridgette Wilson), Kittie (Jana Pallaske), and Silo (Joe Absolom) for a commercial in the Austrian Alps, only for them to disturb a nest of Serbian war criminals plotting a terrorist attack.
It's a pack of sabre-tooth tigers who pose a threat to Sid the sloth in Chris Wedge's Ice Age (2002). But he manages to give them the slip by turning a single ski into a snowboard, as he zips between some jagged rocks. Wedge insisted that only those with snowboarding experience worked on this sequence to make it more authentic and this hit CGI animation was followed by The Meltdown (2006), Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), Continental Drift (2012), and Collision Course (2016), which are all just a click away on Cinema Paradiso.
Improvisation also comes to the aid of Sinbad (Brad Pitt) and Princess Marina (Catherine Zeta Jones) in Tim Johnson and Patrick Gilmore's Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003), as they speed down a snowy slope on a shield in fleeing a gigantic ice roc, which has been sent by Eris the goddess of discord (Michelle Pfeiffer) to prevent them from removing the Book of Peace from Tartarus. The nerves will be much more on edge, however, while watching Greg Huson's comic chiller, Shredder (2003), as Lindsey McKeon and her student friends head for the ski resort her father is about to purchase without knowing that a snowboarder has recently been decapitated while trying to escape from a mysterious black-clad skier.
Another old dark edifice hoves into view in Roar Uthaug's Cold Prey (2006) after a Norwegian snowboarder breaks his leg in a nasty tumble on the Jotunheimen mountain. At first, he and his pals are glad to have found shelter for the night. But they soon realise that they are not alone. Sequels would come in the unsettling form of Mats Stemberg's Cold Prey: Resurrection (2008) and Mikkel Brænne Sandemose's Cold Prey III (2010). By contrast, the shocks are decidedly of the chucklesome variety in Chill Out, Scooby-Doo! (2007), which sends everyone's favourite spook-seeking pooch and his snack-scoffing buddy, Shaggy, on a snowboarding adventure in the Himalayas that inevitably brings them faces to face with the Abominable Snowman. This can be found on Scooby-Doo: 13 Spooky Tales: Holiday Chills and Thrills (2016), which has a natural companion in Scooby-Doo and the Snow Creatures (2011), which includes another snowboarding encounter in There's No Creature Like Snow Creature (2002).
The Sölden region of the Austrian Tyrol provides the backdrop for Pim van Hoeve's Snowfever (2004), which sees Dutch teenager Nicky (Hanna Verboom) compete with her best friends to see who will attend the princess's ball with cockily macho snowboard instructor, Ryan (Daan Schuurmans), only for her to fall for his bashful younger brother, Erik (Egbert-Jan Weeber). Pulses also quicken when Johnny Storm (Chris Evans) slips out of isolation in Tim Story's Fantastic Four (2005) and goes snowboarding after jumping from a helicopter. He is joined by skiing nurse, Kelly (Maria Menounos), who is taken aback when the Human Torch starts heating up during his descent and uses his superpower to create a hot tub in the mountain snow.
Slacker Adam Grimes is convinced that things can only get better when he wins a place at the Pine Mountain Snowboarding Academy in Jonathan B. Schwartz's Frostbite (2005). However, a wild night in a hot tub culminates in him waking in a rubbish bin and he has to overcome the snobbery of Traci Lords and her cohorts in order to prove his worth. Having been diagnosed with a terminal case of Lampington's Disease, Queen Latifah decides to try winter sports in Wayne Wang's Last Holiday (2006), although her snowboarding experience is harshed by self-help guru Timothy Hutton insisting on skiing down beside her. She crash lands on a table in the après-ski area, while he winds up with a mouthful of snow.
Meanwhile, snowboarders Kevin Zegers, Shawn Ashmore, and Emma Bell find themselves stuck 100ft off the ground in a chairlift in Adam Green's Frozen (2010) after going for a last run during the Sunday session on New England's Mount Holliston. The scene switches to nearby Vermont for Jennifer Westfeldt's Friends With Kids, as four couples go for a skiing weekend. Maya Rudolph and Chris O'Dowd and Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm aren't as enamoured with each as they once were, while platonic co-parents Jennifer Westfeldt and Adam Scott have brought along their new partners, Edward Burns and Megan Fox. The latter finds herself on a snowboarding expedition with Hamm, but she lacks the natural talent shown by Felicity Jones in Phil Traill's Chalet Girl (both 2011). The 19 year-old has been working in a burger bar while skateboarding. But she lands a job at the Alpine holiday home of Bill Nighy and Brooke Shields and is coaxed into forgetting her fear of heights to enter a snowboarding competition with a €25,000 prize by her teacher, Ken Duken. Full of class quips and romantic complications, this witty romcom also includes a cameo by champion boarder, Tara Dakides.
An unreliable snowboarding narrator comments on the action in Scott Wheeler's Avalanche Sharks (aka Sharkalanche, 2014), which sees the annual Mammoth Mountain bikini ski day interrupted by a snow slip that unleashes a prehistoric predator who has some feeding to catch up on. The local sheriff calls on some snowboarders to help save the day, but they're not of the standard required to complete the downhill phase of the Ozaki 8 that is being undertaken by eco-terrorist Bodhi (Edgar Ramirez) in Ericson Core's Point Break (2015). FBI rookie Johnny 'Utah' Brigham (Luke Bracey) infiltrates the extreme thrill seekers, whose snowboarding stunts were performed by professionals, Xavier De Le Rue, Louis Vito, Christian Haller, Lucas DeBari, and Ralph Backstrom.
Snowboarders Laurie Calvert and Oscar Dyekjær Giese jet to the Austrian Alps to shoot a commercial with the former's PR girlfriend, Gabriela Marcinková, in Dominik Hartl's Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016). However, a contaminated batch of fake snow turns the residents of Karl Fischer and Margarete Tiesel's ski tavern into ravenous revanants. Having played ice hockey at the Winter Olympics, Eric LeMarque (Josh Hartnett) only has himself to blame for his problems in Scott Waugh's 6 Below (aka 6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain, 2017), as he has gone snowboarding in the High Sierras with a bag of crystal meth and an undercharged phone. Based on fact. this gruelling survival saga shares the state of Utah, an addicted anti-hero, and a lupine connection with Jim Cummings's The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020). The director plays the alcoholic, single-parent sheriff of a ski resort whose troubles begin when a snowboarder is attacked by werewolf.
Drones and an echidna named Knuckles (Idris Elba) cause a superheroic blue hedgehog (Ben Schwartz) problems in Jeff Fowler's Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022), as they send him careering down a mountain on a snowboard while they pursue him for the compass in his possession that could prove vital to tracking down the Master Emerald. Falling head over heels is the last thing that Zoey Miller (Josephine Langford) anticipates while studying at Queens University of Charlotte in Sara Zandieh's The Other Zoey (2023). However, when football star Zack (Drew Starkey) gets amnesia and mistakes her for his girlfriend after being hit by a car, she agrees to go on a skiing holiday in order to get close to his cousin, Miles (Archie Renaux), a brainbox grad student who teaches Zoey to snowboard.
A follow up to That's It, That's All (2008), Curt Morgan's The Art of Flight (2011) provides further insights into the life and talent of American snowboarder, Travis Rice, who wears a Go-Pro camera to provide bone-juddering footage of high-speed action that takes trick riding to the next level. But the risks these athletes take are unflinchingly exposed in Lucy Walker's The Crash Reel (2013), which draws on 15 years of archive footage to show how the rivalry between childhood friends Kevin Pearce and Shaun White began and what it took to enable the former to get back on his board after he barely survives a terrifying crash on the half-pipe course at Park City while training for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
The leaps attempted by aerial skiiers are equally daunting. Having been an exhibition event at Calgary and Albertville, freestyle became a fully fledged Winter Olympic event at Lillehammer. No woman has competed more regularly in the event than Lydia Lassila, the Australian ex-gymnast who risked all at five Games between 2002-2018. Having won gold at Vancouver in 2010, she returned at Sochi after having become a mother. And, as Katie Bender Wynn and Leo Baker's The Will to Fly (2016) reveals, she was determined to land a complex manoeuvre that only male aerialists had achieved before.
Finally, we come to Gus Kenworthy, who has come out of retirement to represent Team GB in the freestyle skiing at Milano-Cortina. Despite being born in Chelmsford, he won silver in the men's slopestyle for the USA at Sochi and featured in such sports docs as The Way I See It (2010) and Attack of La Niña (2011). He has since become an actor in pictures like Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (2017), 80 For Brady (2023), Olympic Dreams (2019), The Sacrifice Game (2023), and Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (2024), as well as the TV series, American Horror Story: 1984 (2019). But after three years in front of the cameras, Kenworthy is back under the five rings to try his luck at his fourth Games. We wish him the best of British.
