Why waste money on an expensive skiing holiday when you can enjoy a range of winter sports from the comfort of your own armchair, thanks to Cinema Paradiso? Experience the rush of downhill skiing without the risk of a tumble and sample the heady thrills of snowboarding without having to wrap up against the cold. But get your skates on, as everyone will want to watch after reading our Brief History of Winter Sports Films.
You only have to see Jennifer Peedom's Mountain (2017) to realise how many winter sports there are. Indeed, the adrenaline will be pumping through your veins, as you view the skiers, snowboarders, mountaineers, ice climbers, free soloists, mountain bikers, BASE jumpers, wingsuiters, parachute cyclists, tightrope walkers and heliskiers showing off their skills for Renan Ozturk's camera. Narrated by Willem Dafoe, this paean to the great outdoors shows how far winter sports cinema has come since Dr Arnold Fanck virtually invented the genre with the 'Bergfilme' or 'mountain films' he produced in Germany in the 1920s.
Among his most famous outings is The Holy Mountain (1926), which centres on the ménage that develops when skier Luis Trenker invites dancer Leni Riefenstahl to his cottage and becomes jealous of her friendship with Ernst Petersen after he lends her his scarf. Fanck would continue to collaborate with Riefenstahl as an editor, as she embarked upon such infamous works of propaganda as Olympia (1938), which drew inspiration from Jugend der Welt (1936), Herbert Brieger and Carl Junghans's record of the Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
All Downhill From Here
Along with Germany, the Nordic nations have a rich tradition of mountain and winter sports films. The majority, however, were produced for domestic consumption and few have been released on disc in this country. Britain's own contribution to the skiing movie has been rather modest since Bernard Vorhaus's Dusty Ermine (1936), which begins with forger Ronald Squire being released from Wormwood Scrubs. However, he quickly discovers that nephew Arthur Macrae has become involved with a Swiss gang and travels to the ski resort run by Austin Trevor to extricate him, only for niece Jane Baxter to fall for Anthony Bushell, the Scotland Yard detective bent on nabbing the Alpine crooks.
Old pals Nigel Patrick and David Tomlinson also holiday in a skiing resort in the Swiss Alps in Wendy Toye's All For Mary (1955) and promptly fall for hotelier's daughter Jill Day. They have competition, however, in Greek tycoon Leo McKern, who also plays a prominent part in Richard Lester's Help! (1965), as John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney try to protect Ringo Starr from the Kali cult that is after the ring that has become stuck on the drummer's finger. When they hide out in the Austrian Alps, mad scientist Victor Spinetti and gormless assistant Roy Kinnear seek to sabotage a curling match by blowing a hole in the ice on a frozen lake. Swimmer Mal Evans appears and asks the way to the White Cliffs of Dover before cult leader McKern stalks the Fab Four while they fool around on the slopes to the sound of 'Ticket to Ride'. Amusingly, he winds up winning a ski-jumping competition after disciple Eleanor Bron deliberately gives him the wrong directions and he flies through the air with the greatest of ease.
Obviously, nobody does such daredevil exploits better than James Bond. After George Lazenby had been chased on skis down Piz Gloria in Switzerland in Peter Hunt's On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), Roger Moore's 007 opens Lewis Gilbert's The Spy Who Loved Me (1981) with a ski chase before floating away on a Union Jack parachute after a daring leap off an alpine ledge. Moore had to deal with several winter sports in John Glen's For Your Eyes Only (1981), as a duel with East German biathlete John Wyman is followed by a battle with some of Julian Glover's henchmen wearing ice hockey gear when Moore visits a rink to say his goodbyes to skater Lynn-Holly Johnson (a first-time actress who had once come second in the US Figure Skating Championships). Not to be outdone, Piers Brosnan drives a paragliding snowmobile in Michael Apted's The World Is Not Enough (1999), as he pays a call on oil tycoon's daughter, Sophie Marceau, at the site of a new pipeline in Azerbaijan.
With the Sun Valley resort almost on its doorstep, Hollywood made a clutch of skiing movies during its Golden Age. In Charles Lamont's Hit the Ice (1943), local newspaper shutterbugs Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are mistaken for Detroit hitmen by gangster Sheldon Leonard and track him down to the ski haven after they are accused of being lookouts at a bank robbery. The same setting provides the backdrop for Robert Z. Leonard's Duchess of Idaho (1950), as Esther Williams arrives on the slopes to help best friend Paula Raymond snare boss John Lund. However, both he and bandleader Van Johnson fall for Williams, who needs to take a dip or two in order to cool off.
Gabriel Valley proves crucial in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). But don't let the shoddy back-projection distract you during the skiing sequence in this troubling thriller, as Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck try to discover both what happened to an eminent psychoanalyst who has mysteriously disappeared and the reason for Peck's phobia about parallel lines against a white background. Exploitation maverick Roger Corman shows the Master of Suspense how to shoot in a white wilderness in Ski Troop Attack (1960), a Second World War adventure that sees an American reconnaissance unit comprising Michael Forest, Frank Wolff and Wally Campo get trapped behind enemy lines and start snooping on troop movements over a key bridgehead while being tracked by Nazi patrols.
Robert Redford was deadly earnest in his pursuit of glory in Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer (1969), as he joins the United States ski team coached by Gene Hackman only to become distracted by Camilla Sparv, the assistant of the ski manufacturer who wants Redford to advertise his products.
There's blue-collar laddishness on display in Patrick Hasburgh's Aspen Extreme (1993), as working stiffs Peter Berg and Paul Gross leave Detroit and head to Colorado to become ski instructors. However, their plans to win the prestigious Powder 8 downhill are jeopardised by the attentions of club DJ Teri Polo and vampish rich guest Finola Hughes. A decade later, in Marni Banack's Snow Job (aka Winter Break, 2003), Wall Street trader Milo Ventimiglia realises he's made a huge mistake in following the big bucks when he joins buddies Eddie Mills and Eddie Kaye Thomas at the Aspen ski lodge where they are working for a year and proceeds to fall head over heels with the level-headed Maggie Lawson.
The same year also saw the release of Greg Huson's Shredder (2003), in which Lyndsey McKeon and boyfriend Scott Weinger join their friends in the chalet owned by her rich father in an exclusive winter resort. Unfortunately, a mysterious figure in black has been preying upon the skiers in the area and he inevitably makes a play for the friends, as they settle in for a night of booze and spooky stories.
By contrast, the thrills and spills are all real in Mark Obenhaus's Steep (2007), which features some of the world's most audacious extreme skiers. This is available to rent on a double bill with Greg Stump's The Blizzard of Aahhh's (1988) and these jaw-dropping films take their cues from the work of Warren Miller, who crops up alongside surf movie pioneer Bruce Brown in Jon Long's The Search For Freedom (2015), which includes skiing and snowboarding in its survey of thrill rush sports.
There may be a quarter of a century between John Cusack's two trips to the piste, but he is on fine form in both. Savage Steve Holland's Better Off Dead (1985) sees Cusack lose girlfriend Amanda Wyss and his place on the school ski team to meathead jock Aaron Dozier. He half-heartedly contemplates suicide before French exchange student Diane Franklin takes him on to the Californian slopes to boost his confidence. And Cusack and Craig Robinson do much the same for buddy Rob Corddry in Steve Pink's Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), as the trio and Cusack's nephew (Clark Duke) head back to the Kodiak Valley ski resort where they had once had fun in the 1980s. However, following a drunken night in the hotel hot tub, an injudicious prank with a Russian energy drink branded 'Chernobyl' transports they guys back to their heyday.
The scene shifts to a ski resort in the Swiss Alps in Ursula Meier's Sister (2012), as 12 year-old Kacey Mottet Klein makes a living by stealing from tourists and selling his ill-gotten gains to the next influx of skiers. British chalet chef Martin Compston wants a cut of the proceeds, while sister Léa Seydoux grabs whatever she can to indulge the hedonistic lifestyle that makes Klein more envious than ever of the cosy existence that bourgeois mother Gillian Anderson provides for her children. But, in order for his fortunes to change, Klein has to force Seydoux to face up to an unpalatable truth. Family tensions also come to the surface in Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure (2014), which opens with Swedish businessman Johannes Bah Kuhnke enjoying a skiing holiday in a French alpine resort with his Norwegian wife, Lisa Loven Kongsli, and their two children. However, as they have lunch in the hotel overlooking the mountains, a managed avalanche gets out of control and engulfs the restaurant deck and Kongsli accuses her husband of putting his own safety before that of his family by running away from the tide of snow.
Board Stiff
Snowboarding became popular in the United States in the 1960s and it has been an Olympic sport since the Nagano Games in 1998. This was a year after Hollywood cottoned on to the activity in John Shepphird's Snowboard Academy (1997), a slapstick indie comedy boasting the talents of Jim Varney, Corey Haim and Brigitte Nielsen. If you want to see some of the true legends of the sport, however, try Brendan and Emmett Malloy's Out Cold (2001), as Todd Richards, Rio Tahara, Tara Dakides, Devun Walsh and Rob 'Sluggo' Boyce perform some spectacular stunts in a rite of passage that sees slackers Jason London and Zach Galifianakis strive to prevent property developer Lee Majors from turning Bull Mountain into an exclusive ski resort.
Commercials director Rudus Sewell hires snowboarders Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Joe Absolom and Jana Pallaske to undertake a highly dangerous avalanche stunt in Christian Duguay's Extreme Ops (2002). But their situation becomes even more perilous when they discover some Serbian war criminals in hiding near their location shoot. Five young Norwegians go snowboarding on the Jotunheimen mountain in Roar Urhaug's Cold Prey (2006). When one of the party breaks a leg in a fall, however, the friends have to hole up in an abandoned hotel until the weather clears. But it soon becomes clear that they are not alone and the scares generated by their malevolent companion prompted the producers to release two sequels, Mats Stenberg's Cold Prey: Resurrection (2008) and Mikkel Brænne Sandemose's Cold Prey 3 (2010).
Slacker Adam Grimes is convinced that things can only get better when he wins a place at the Pine Mountain Snowboarding Academy in Jonathan B. Schwartz's Frostbite (2005). However, a wild night in a hot tub culminates in him waking in a rubbish bin and he has to overcome the snobbery of Traci Lords and her cohorts in order to prove his worth. Meanwhile, in Adam Green's Frozen (2010), boarders Kevin Zegers, Shawn Ashmore and Emma Bell find themselves stuck in a ski lift chair on Mount Holliston in New England after going for one last run at the end of a Sunday session.
Onetime skateboarding champion Felicity Jones takes a job in the Alps to help her ailing father in Phil Traill's Chalet Girl (2011). Despite the sneering of workmate Tamsin Egerton, Jones tries her hand at snowboarding and instructor Ken Duken gives her lessons so that she can enter a competition with a €25,000 prize. Despite her best efforts, Jones doesn't reach the standards set by Laurie Calvert and Oscar Dyekjær Giese in Dominik Hartl's Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016), as they travel to the Austrian Alps to shoot a commercial with the former's PR girlfriend, Gabriela Marcinková. However, a toxic batch of fake snow has a peculiar effect on the residents of Karl Fischer and Margarete Tiesel's ski chalet and the survivors face the tricky prospect of having to make it through the woods to reach the rescue chopper.
Nothing beats the drama provided by real life, however. In the run-up to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Kevin Pearce appears to be the only person who can stop onetime best buddy Shaun White from taking the snowboarding gold. But, as Lucy Walker reveals in the compelling documentary, The Crash Reel (2013), Pearce suffers a horrific training injury and defies medical advice to return to the slopes and attempt his signature move.
Flashing Blades
Norwegian Sonja Henie won more figure skating medals than any woman in the history of the sport. In addition to three Olympic golds (1928-36), she had also won six European and 10 World titles by the time she signed a lucrative contract with Twentieth Century-Fox. In Sidney Lanfield's Second Fiddle (1939), Henie plays a sweet-natured Minnesota schoolteacher who is plucked from obscurity to become a film star by publicist Tyrone Power. But she's more at ease in H. Bruce Humberstone's Sun Valley Serenade (1941), which transports her to the Californian mountains and the ski resort where the romance between pianist John Payne and singer Lynn Bari is thrown into confusion when press agent Milton Berle arranges for Payne to adopt a Norwegian war orphan. In addition to a couple of glorious Henie skating routines, this breezy musical also features numbers by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, in the guise of the Dartmouth Troubadours.
Ice skating of the recreational rather than the competitive kind has featured in dozens of films. Admittedly, the slipping and sliding that so amuses Thumper in Walt Disney's Bambi (1942) doesn't quite count. For example, Michael Apted's adaptation of Martin Cruz Smith's bestseller, Gorky Park (1983), opens at an outdoor skating rink. But the most chilling skating sequences of recent times were staged in the mist by Diao Yinan in Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014), an utterly engrossing crime drama in which Liao Fan excels as the disgraced cop-turned-security guard on the track of a ruthless serial killer in turn-of-the-century Heilongjiang Province.
Back on the competitive rink, Paul Michael Glaser's The Cutting Edge (1992) poses the problem that blue-blooded ice dancer Moira Kelly and working-class hockey jock DB Sweeney can't abide each other. But magic happens whenever they take to the ice and they agree to bury their differences in order to take their last tilt at Olympic glory. Over a quarter of a century later, Sean McNamara came up with The Cutting Edge 2 (2006), a long-overdue sequel that sees figure skater Christy Carlson Romano pair up with extreme skater Ross Thomas to go for gold at the Winter Games.
Disney had produced numerous skating pictures for television, but Tim Fywell's Ice Princess (2005) made it to the big screen to show how geeky student Michelle Trachtenberg becomes hooked on skating while working on a physics project that could earn her a Harvard scholarship. Yet, while the coach and disgraced former Olympic star Kim Cattrall thinks she has talent and encourages her to help younger skaters like Hayden Panettiere, pushy mom Joan Cusack wants Trachtenberg to focus on her education. Taylor Firth plays another promising skater whose dreams of making it to the top appear to be over in Donald Wrye's Ice Castles (2010) when she is blinded in an accident. However, boyfriend Rob Mayes is determined to get her back on track in this remake of the same director's 1978 original, which had starred Lynn-Holly Johnson and Robby Benson.
Mention skating movies and the two that most people will remember are Josh Gordon's Blades of Glory (2007) and Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya (2017). The former is a hilarious farce that sees Will Ferrell and Jon Heder stripped of their medals and banned from competing by the National Figure Skating Association after fighting on the podium at the World Winter Sport Games. Undaunted, however, the fierce rivals find a loophole in their punishment and enter a competition for pairs. Despite telling a true story (or, at least. a variation on it), the latter still seems much more far fetched as Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) is driven by the ambitions of her monstrous mother, LaVona Golden (the Oscar-winning Allison Janney), to sabotage the chances of her bitter rival, Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver), as they compete for a place on the US team at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.
The blood, sweat and tears are more honestly earned in Gillies MacKinnon's Torvill & Dean (2018), which stars Poppy Lee Friar and Will Tudor as Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean, who trained under Betty Callaway (Annabelle Apsion) and Janet Sawbridge (Jaime Winstone) at the Nottingham Ice Rink and captured the hearts of a nation with their gold medal-winning performance of Maurice Ravel's 'Bolero' at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. It shouldn't be forgotten, however, that they were following in the blade trails of John Curry and Robin Cousins, who had respectively taken gold for Britain at Innsbruck in 1976 and Lake Placid in 1980. While the latter went on to be head judge on ITV's Dancing on Ice (2006-14), the former struggled with his professional and personal demons and his tragic tale is told with typical insight by sports documentary specialist James Erskine in The Ice King (2018).
Pick of the Pucks
Ice hockey is not for the faint-hearted and a number of Hollywood icons have wielded a stick in anger. What wouldn't we give to see John Wayne play a chicken farmer who has turned his back on the sport in Arthur Lubin's Idol of the Crowds (1937), only to be lured into a comeback by the coach of the struggling New York Panthers? But Cinema Paradiso users can see George Formby refereeing a hockey match in Anthony Kimmins's I See Ice (1938), which is available on the George Formby Collection, Volume 1. Although he works as a prop man for a touring ice ballet, George devotes his spare time to taking snapshots with his self-designed camera and his attempts at officiating have typically chaotic consequences.
Like skating, hockey has cameo'd in different films. Canadian actor Mike Myers is a big fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs and, having slipped several hockey references into Penelope Spheeris's Wayne's World (1992), he made his beloved team a key plot point in Marco Schnabel's The Love Guru (2008), in which the World's No.2 Guru is hired by Maple Leafs owner Jessica Alba to help star player Romany Malco regain his mojo after he loses wife Meagan Good to Justin Timberlake, who plays for Stanley Cup rivals, the Los Angeles Kings.
Two classic hockey pictures appeared in 1977. Robert Markowitz's The Deadliest Season centred on hockey star Michael Moriarty being charged with manslaughter after a death on the ice. But this TV-movie is best remembered for giving Meryl Streep her small-screen debut as Moriarty's wife. Hockey fans much prefer George Roy Hill's Slap Shot (1977), which stars Paul Newman as Reggie Dunlop, the coach of the Charlestown Chiefs hockey team, which faces extinction after news breaks that 10,000 jobs are to be lost at the local mill. However, Dunlop unleashes bruising brothers Jeff. Steve and Jack Hanson (Jeff and Steve Carlson and David Hanson) on an unsuspecting league and the town gets behind the team, even though some of the squad disapprove of the new aggressive tactics.
While the Hanson siblings returned in Steve Boyum's Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice (2002), the Chiefs are now coached by Sean Linden (Steven Baldwin), who quickly finds himself at loggerheads with new millionaire owner, Richmond Claremont (Gary Busey). The Hansons are also in the wings, along with Leslie Nielsen as the town's mayor, in Richard Martin's Slap Shot 3: The Junior League (2008), which sees coach Riley Haskell (Greyston Hall) take the reins of the hockey team at the Newman Home for Boys (geddit?).
Peter Markle's Youngblood (1986) has New York farmboy Rob Lowe cross into Canada to pursue his hockey ambitions with the Hamilton Mustangs. But, while he has the speed to make the grade. Lowe proves somewhat lightweight and it's only when star teammate Patrick Swayze is deliberately injured by a rival player that Lowe and netminder Keanu Reeves step up to the plate to beat the Thunder Bay Bombers in the Memorial Cup. Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Chicago Blackhawks provides the backdrop to Peter Hyams's Sudden Death (1995), which sees terminated CIA agent Joshua Foss (Powers Boothe) make the mistake of kidnapping the daughter of French-Canadian firefighter Darren McCord (Jean-Claude Van Damme) in his bid to demand a multi-million dollar ransom from the abduction of Vice President Daniel Binder (Raymond J. Barry).
The only feature in this rundown to bring about the formation of an actual ice hockey team is Steven Herek's The Mighty Ducks (1992), whose sleeper success prompted Disney to set up the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, who still play in the National Hockey League. At the heart of the action is macho lawyer Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez), who is compelled to take on the District 5 peewee hockey team as part of his community service for drink driving. Having missed a last-minute penalty in a crucial game as a kid, Bombay has to overcome his own hang-ups in turning a team of no-hopers into contenders. But the deciding game is against his old team, The Hawks, who are coached by Jack Reilly (Lane Smith), the man who made his life a misery after his penalty howler.
Bombay returned in Sam Weisman's D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994), in which he juggles a comeback with the Minnehaha Waves with coaching the US Goodwill Games team. He was also back for Robert Liberman's D3: The Mighty Ducks (1996), which follows star player Charlie Conway (Joshua Jackson) to Bombay's old school. Eden Hall Academy, where he has to deal with both the snobbery of his privileged classmates and the bullying of coach Ted Orion (Jeffrey Nordling), who has yet to get over being dropped by a major league team.
Released the same year, Denis Dugan's Happy Gilmore sees Adam Sandler's misfiring hockey play swap his stick for a club in a bid to win a golf tournament and save the house that grandmother Frances Bay is set to lose to the tax inspector. More underdogs battle the odds stacked heavily against them in Jay Roach's Mystery, Alaska (1999), which is set in a hockey-mad town that turns out in force each Saturday to watch a game on the local pond. But, when the New York Rangers request a high-profile friendly, sheriff Russell Crowe, judge Burt Reynolds and mayor Colm Meaney have to bury the hatchet in order to present a united front against the all-star visitors.
Robert Vince's Most Valuable Primate (2002) also looks on the light side, as a three year-old laboratory chimp named Jack not only helps Kevin Zegers improve his hockey game, but also takes to the ice himself to ensure that the Nelson Nuggets qualify for the Harvest Cup final in Vancouver. As American hockey supporters will tell you, this unlikely outcome is nothing compared to the true story told by Steven Hilliard Stern in Miracle on Ice (1981) and retold by Gavin O'Connor in Miracle (2004), which takes us to the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in 1980 for a reconstruction of the US hockey team's unexpected triumph under coach Herb Brooks. Returning to the Disney studio where he had started out as a child star, Kurt Russell gives an inspirational performance as the motivator who keeps a fractious squad sufficiently focused to take each game as it comes.
Michael Lembeck's Tooth Fairy (both 2010) sees rock hard hockey enforcer Dwayne Johnson tell girlfriend Ashley Judd's young daughter that the tooth fairy doesn't exist when he's caught stealing a dollar from under her pillow. However, he is punished by chief fairy Julie Andrews and taught how to use his new wings by Billy Crystal and Stephen Merchant, as Johnson has to spend a week atoning for being a 'dream crusher'.
Johnson would doubtless have enjoyed the minor league punch-up in Michael Dowse's Goon (2011) which results in nice, but dim Massachusetts bouncer Seann William Scott being hired by the Halifax Highlanders as a minder for talented player Marc-André Grondin, who has failed to recover his nerve after being struck on the head. However, his next game is against Liev Schreiber, an uncompromising bruiser, who has been demoted from the majors for slashing an opponent. Finally, the exploits of former ice hockey player Eric LeMarque inspired the action in Scott Waugh's 6 Below (2017), which casts Josh Hartnett as an intrepid snowboarder who has to cope with the treacherous conditions and conquer his demons after getting lost in a severe winter storm.
Mush, Brush and Slush
Mushing might not be an Olympic sport, but racing dog sleds has always been a popular pursuit in the frozen north. Charles Haid's Iron Will (1994) takes us back to 1917 to show how Mackenzie Astin loses his father in a mushing accident and decides to enter a major race in Canada in order to save the family farm in South Dakota. Organiser David Ogden Stiers is reluctant to allow the novice to compete, but journalist Kevin Spacey contributes towards Astin's entrance fee and gets his readers rooting for the underdog through his newspaper reports.
Despite a brush with fame, Paul Gross turns his back on his promising curling career in the self-directed Men With Brooms (2002). Indeed, such is his disillusion that he tosses his stones into a lake. A decade later, however, Gross returns home to attend the funeral of his old coach and friends and curling-obsessed father, Leslie Nielsen, coax him into making a comeback in order to compete for the Golden Broom. The achievements of British curling skips Rhona Martin and Eve Muirhead have yet to be immortalised on the screen, but Dexter Fletcher's Eddie the Eagle (2016) affectionately recalls how Cheltenham-born Michael Edwards realised his dream to compete in the 70m and 90m events in the Ski Jump at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.
But there is only one place to end and that is with the greatest Winter Olympics movie of them all, Jon Turteltaub's Cool Runnings (1993). Inspired by the heroic efforts of the Jamaican quarter that competed in the four-man bobsleigh at the 1988 Games in Calgary, the story follows sprinter Derice Bannock (Leon Robinson) after he decides to switch sports and enlist the help of fellow speed merchants Sanka Coffie (Doug E. Doug), Yul Brenner (Malik Yoba) and Junior Bevil (Rawle D. Lewis) in persuading coach Irv Blitzer (John Candy) to prepare them for the Olympic trials.
Before we go, however, we have two splendidly contrasting French films. Although snowball fights aren't a recognised winter sport, they are good fun, as the children battling for control of a village fort discover in Jean-François Pouliot and François Brisson's animation, Cleo (2015), which is also known as Snowtime. However, the most famous snowball fight in screen history was staged by Abel Gance at the military academy in his enduringly magisterial 1927 silent epic, Napoleon.
If you want even more seasonal film recommendation, do check out our top 10 winter and snow movies!
