BASKETBALL
The slight chill in the air means one thing to most folks around here: Basketball- serious hoops! So how has the silver screen treated our roundball passion? There are at least 50 movies that deal with basketball in one way or another, and most aren’t very good. Trust Mr. Movie to find the gold among the dross.
Black And White (2000) is partly about basketball and partly about white kids’ infatuation with black culture. The basketball parts are pretty good. The NBA’s Allen Houston is rather good as a hoopster. Finding Forrester (2000) is a better film, and the basketball part of it is also well done. Rob Brown is a ghetto kid recruited for the upscale white prep school because he can play. Sean Connery is a reclusive one-book author who becomes the kid’s mentor. Most instructive as to how people get used and how assumptions can be way wrong.
Perhaps the best basketball film ever made is the stunning documentary Hoop Dreams (1994), the true story of two black kids from the Chicago slums who dream of making it out via the basketball court. The distractions and hurdles they face along the way are more than most of us could bear, and the basketball is the real stuff. As with most fine films, Hoop Dreams turns out to be more about life than its presumptive subject, basketball. 
Hoosiers (1986) yanks our heartstrings with both hands as a small Indiana high school improbably goes for the State Championship. Gene Hackman is superb, as always, as the coach. Dennis Hopper has a nice turn as an alcoholic basketball junkie 
who still knows more about the game when drunk than most people who are sober. Not liking Hoosiers would be at least mildly un-American.
From tears to laughter in one fell swoop, check out White Men Can’t Jump (1992) with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes as improbable basketball hustlers. Rosie Perez is excellent as Mr. Harrelson’s girlfriend, who is tired of his basketball obsession, and whose lifetime goal is to get on Jeopardy. The two guys are able to hustle people by playing on their assumptions, and by dogging it until it counts. 
Coach Carter (2005) stars Samuel L. Jackson in a true story of a basketball coach who benched his undefeated starting line-up because of poor academics. This didn’t go over with almost anyone, but he stuck to his guns with pretty amazing results.
He Got Game (1998) is a Spike Lee story in which convict Denzel Washington is let out of jail so he talk his estranged son, a basketball superstar (Ray Allen, an NBA player), into attending the governor’s alma mater. If you can buy that premise, you might like it. The basketball is well done.
All of the films in this column are available on DVD and for streaming. All are suitable for 10 and up.