Paste's The 50 Best Boxing Movies of All Time
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By Christina Newland | April 9, 2024 | 1:15am
Boxing and the cinema have been inseparable from the earliest days of movie-making. The propulsive excitement and fierce elegance of the sport were perfectly suited to the screen, and some of the earliest surviving motion pictures are filmed boxing matches. As the sport grew in popularity throughout the 20th century, so too did the movie genre.
It’s no surprise filmmakers return to it frequently. With the sport’s mythic, violent clashes and long history of social eruption, it can be an allegory for nearly whatever you want it to be. They can be simple fight yarns, but more often they’re other things—explorations of greedy commercial exploitation, poverty, violence, race. They prod at class divisions, and at what it means to be a ‘man’ in the world. But they can also be brooding meditations on what may have been or could never be. They speak of the long dark night of the soul, a damned-if-you-do existentialism where you rise from the gutter only to be chewed up and spat out again by the fierce internal cogs of the sport. Then again, there are light-hearted celebratory biopics and slapstick parodies to choose from, too.
You’ll find all of the above in our list of the 50 best boxing movies:
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1 new
Body and Soul
1947, in 6 top lists Check -
2 new
Raging Bull
1980, in 34 top lists Check -
3 new
Rocky
1976, in 20 top lists Check -
4 new
Fat City
1972, in 9 top lists Check -
5 new
The Set-Up
1949, in 9 top lists Check -
6 new
Requiem for a Heavyweight
1962, in 1 top list Check -
7 new
The Harder They Fall
1956, in 3 top lists Check -
8 new
Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of...
2004, in 0 top lists Check -
9 new
When We Were Kings
1996, in 7 top lists Check -
10 new
Tyson
2008, in 0 top lists Check -
11 new
30 for 30: Muhammad and Larry
2009, in 0 top lists Check -
12 new
The Greatest
1977, in 0 top lists Check -
14 new
Million Dollar Baby
2004, in 12 top lists Check -
16 new
Rocco e i suoi fratelli
1960 — a.k.a. Rocco and His Brothers, in 19 top lists Check -
17 new
Somebody Up There Likes Me
1956, in 3 top lists Check -
18 new
Day of the Fight
1951, in 0 top lists Check -
19 new
The Fighter
2010, in 2 top lists Check -
20 new
Girlfight
2000, in 3 top lists Check -
22 new
Creed
2015, in 4 top lists Check -
23 new
Ali
2001, in 0 top lists Check -
24 new
The Great White Hype
1996, in 0 top lists Check -
25 new
Rocky Balboa
2006, in 0 top lists Check -
26 new
Bleed for This
2016, in 0 top lists Check -
31 new
Don King: Only in America
1997, in 0 top lists Check -
35 new
The Champ
1931, in 3 top lists Check -
40 new
The Bleeder
2016 — a.k.a. Chuck, in 0 top lists Check -
41 new
Cinderella Man
2005, in 2 top lists Check -
42 new
The Hurricane
1999, in 1 top list Check -
43 new
The Boxer
1997, in 0 top lists Check -
44 new
Resurrecting the Champ
2007, in 0 top lists Check -
49 new
The Joe Louis Story
1953, in 0 top lists Check
Last updated on Apr 11, 2024; source