5 To Watch: Ice skating movies that go for the gold

So many of the events in the Winter Olympics just seem to be about falling, whether it’s traveling down a mountain on two sticks, lying on top of someone in the doubles luge, etc. But figure skating stands apart from the snow-based sports as something much more graceful, gliding across the ice and attempting to defy gravity, not succumb to it—in the case of recent Olympic gold medal winner Nathan Chen, with a quadruple axel, no less.So it’s unsurprising that the magic of ice-skating has also made its way to movies. As these Olympics draw to a close, you may be longing for more pairs routines and gold medal ambitions. Why not check out these cinematic forays into the figure skating world—from Sonja Henie’s Busby Berkeley-inspired extravaganzas to Tonya Harding’s rebellious attempt at Olympic greatness. At the very least, some of these more in-depth looks at skating challenges might give you a bit more appreciation for the perfection of those routines as these athletes vie for a spot on that heralded podium.

Norway’s Sonja Henie was an Olympic champion in a world before television, which made her a good fit for the movies, with audiences hungry to see the famous athlete. The blonde, dimpled skater wasn’t much of an actor, but that didn’t seem to matter much as she glided off into one extravagant ice dance number after another. Sun Valley Serenade was the best of these cinematic outings, as Henie’s presence was bolstered by dashing John Payne as her love interest, future standards supplied by Glenn Miller himself, a wisecracking Milton Berle, and even the fabulous Nicholas Brothers. Henie’s attempts to win Payne over from his blameless girlfriend (her only flaw seems to be that she’s not a fan of winter sports) are downright villainous, but nevertheless, her skating dances on black ice are stunning. And the setting is sublime, enough to turn even the most devout winter-hater into someone considering a trip to Idaho before the end of the season. [Gwen Ihnat]

Waverly, Iowa is a far cry from Sun Valley, but it’s where gifted young skater Lexie Winston (Lynn-Holly Johnson) dreams of Olympic gold despite her humble rural upbringing. With her supportive father (Tom Skerritt), bitter coach (Colleen Dewhurst), and hockey-playing boyfriend (Robby Benson) behind her, Lexie reaches for the stars. But as happens so often in sports movies of this era, Lexie’s ambitions and life in the fast lane lead her to forget where she came from; so when a tragic accident occurs, naturally, she has to start all over again. Cheesy enough to be served on crackers, Ice Castles is still a fun winter watch thanks to its casting of a skater who can effectively act, a teen romance with plenty of chemistry, an earworm theme song, and an ending scene for the melodramatic ages: “We forgot about the flowers.” [Gwen Ihnat]

D.B. Sweeney and Moira Kelly star as two world-class athletes whose Olympic dreams are deferred by an eye injury and stubbornness, respectively. Hockey player Doug (Sweeney) must alter course on his way to the gold, trading in his helmet for sparkly shirts to become Kate’s (Kelly) figure-skating partner. She’s imperious, he’s affable, so there’s no way they can work together, right? Of course, the pertinent rule of attraction dictates that these opposites will fall in love despite their differences. It’s a stale premise made fresh by Sweeney’s hangdog charm and Kelly’s vulnerability. [Danette Chavez]

Far and away the funniest figure-skating movie ever made, Blades Of Glory stars Will Farrell and Jon Heder as rivals Chazz Michael Michaels and Jimmy MacElroy, respectively. Jimmy is a super-privileged germaphobe who looks like a grown-up Little Prince, while Chazz is the self-described bad boy of skating who’s also an “ice-devouring sex tornado.” After both are banned from competition for fighting on the podium of the film’s —the World Winter Sports Games—their ingenious coach Drew Goddard (Craig T. Nelson) puts the feuding duo together as the first male-male team in the history of the pairs figure skating. The interpretive dance training montages are just a bonus, not to mention then-wife-and-husband Amy Poehler and Will Arnett as a competing brother-sister team who seem to be just a little too close. But the best part is seeing Chazz’s improvisational style up against Jimmy’s perfectionism, as a literal fire and ice team that’s bound to ride their unprecedented (and hilarious) choreography straight to a gold medal. (“So many moves in this program I’ve never heard of before,” raves commentator Scott Hamilton.) [Gwen Ihnat]

I, Tonya strips away all the glamour of the rink to tell the brutal story of Tonya Harding—a tale everyone thought they knew, but director Craig Gillespie and writer Steven Rogers dive deep to tell Tonya’s side of the story. Harding, who skated from the time she was 4 and famously rebelled against the short-and-sassy dynamics of the post-Dorothy Hamill skating era, lost her entire career due to her abusive husband’s idiotic plan to take down her competitor Nancy Kerrigan (described in the breaking-the-fourth-wall movie as “the incident”). But I, Tonya shows that there’s much more than “the incident” to Harding’s story. Allison Janney won an Oscar for playing the worst skate mom imaginable, while Margot Robbie was nominated for playing a skater with such tenacity that she just couldn’t give in. Certainly the most awards-worthy film on this list, I, Tonya also gets points for highlighting Harding’s historical accomplishment as the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition. [Gwen Ihnat]