Lindsay Anderson's first feature film is also his best, giving Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts the roles of their lives.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 6, 2024

This Sporting Life is a stupendous film. It has a blow like a fist. I've never seen an English picture that gave such expression to the violence and the capacity for pain that there is in the English character.

| Mar 9, 2024

A brilliantly ruthless portrait of a professional football player and his brutish world.

| Aug 10, 2022

A skillfully made but glum character study sports film.

| Original Score: B | May 3, 2022

Although what it narrates is familiar to me with the domestic disputes of the protagonists, I immediately forget any comparison when i'm moved with the powerful performances from Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 3, 2020

Anderson's use of the camera is either too flatly, clutteredly realistic or else too "indicative." Few Hollywood movies are as flimsily motivated as this allegedly realistic film.

| Aug 13, 2019

This has its flaws and certainly its detractors but this dated British social-realist epic has a power to it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 31, 2018

This unique and essential film stands out as being the best of its genre, showcasing a blunt sexuality along with a modern, smartly-edited sensibility.

| Original Score: 9/10 | May 31, 2018

Anderson's visual sense is remarkably strong for a film that relies for much of its length on a highly complex and intriguing flashback narrative.

| Jun 15, 2015

Leagues above the sanitized picture of organized professional athletics exemplified by '42,' 'This Sporting Life' wallows in the mud of the moral dirt that surrounds and runs the whole.

| Nov 10, 2013

The film is raw and confident, but it's a little shallow, too.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 5, 2009

I can't think of a sport movie that is better photographed. The black and white cinematography is gorgeously stark, the perfect medium for this bleakly unforgiving tale.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 5, 2009

This Sporting Life shrewdly anticipates modern Britain: a dour, yet thrilling and exhilarating film.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 5, 2009

I'm tempted to see it as one of the strongest films of that period, every frame of which pulsates with drama, class confusion and erotic force.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 5, 2009

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 5, 2009

From its virtuoso opening shot of a rugby scrum -- from the bottom, looking up -- to its final emotionally draining moments, This Sporting Life is a captivating, visceral film experience.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 22, 2008

Lindsay Anderson, making his debut as a feature director, brings the keen, observant eye of a documentary man to many vivid episodes without sacrificing the story line.

| Jan 22, 2008

This Sporting Life is a quintessential entrant in Britain's kitchen-sink realism of the late-'50s and '60s.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 21, 2008

A reminder that something really was stirring in those days of the British New Wave before it frittered itself away.

Full Review | Feb 9, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 5, 2005