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.

(2017)

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]