Dir. Paul Crowder & John Dower  UK/US  2006  97mins  Digital

Girls. Greed. Goals. Superstars and Excess. And that's just the first half.

The Cosmos began as a rag-tag team, started on a whim by one of the most powerful men in entertainment. Steve Ross, the founder of Warner Communications, had never even seen a soccer game before he helped finance a team. Within five years, Ross had convinced the greatest player in the history of the sport to leave his beloved Brazil for the nascent Cosmos and become a soccer missionary in the USA. Under Ross and Warner Communications, Pele became the richest professional athlete on the planet, and the Cosmos became the most celebrated club of superstars ever assembled. In the summer of 1977, with a serial killer on the loose and Manhattan descending into lawlessness and chaos, the Cosmos became the toast of Studio 54 and the darlings of millions of Americans; winning championships, touring the globe and igniting a soccer revolution in the land of basketball, baseball and the almighty gridiron.

Dir. Tomas Gislason  Denmark  2005  105mins  35mm

That the road to victory is paved with suffering and pain, is an indisputable fact in one of the world’s most arduous sports – professional cycling. But a burning love for the sport – and an unconquerable belief in his ability to create the ideal rider and the perfect pro-cycling team – drives one man to persist in his unremitting struggle for success. This film delivers an intimate insight into the demanding task of turning a group of super individualists into a strong, close-knit team, and puts focus on the philosophies and inspirations that are instilled in the riders. It portrays the leadership and vision designed to carry the riders further in their careers while at same time creating joint results that they never even dreamed of achieving.

Dir. Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parreno  France/Iceland  2006  90mins  35mm

Turner Prize-winning artist and filmmaker Douglas Gordon teams up with French artist Philippe Parreno to create a work glorious in its simplicity. The film was made by training 17 cameras solely on footballer Zinédine Zidane over the course of a single match between Real Madrid and Villareal. Zidane himself recounts, in voice-over, what he can and cannot remember from his matches. Accompanied by a majestic score from Scottish post-rock legends Mogwai, this is not only the greatest football movie ever made, but also one of the finest studies of man in the workplace, an ode to the loneliness of the athlete and the poise and resilience of the human body.