(Photo by Magnet Releasing/courtesy Everett Collection)

Best Hockey Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

Let’s talk about the sport that combines sharp blades, blunt sticks, 100-mile-per-hour pucks, and regularly scheduled fistfights. You’d think hockey and Hollywood would go together like and ice and blood, but that sport-to-movie pipeline is still being built, and we’re still a ways off before movies about hockey can compete with football, basketball, baseball, and Jamaican bobsledding.

We’ll start with the 10 best-reviewed hockey movies, with Certified Fresh films at the top. Red Army is a Soviet-focused documentary, especially on the five players that played for the Detroit Wings in the 1990s. (This so-called Russian Five got their own doc of the same name in 2018.) But if you want to see the Soviets get beaten, then check out 2004’s Miracle, which re-stages the U.S. Olympic hockey team victory at the legendary 1980 match.

Goon captures the day-to-day essence of hockey (an accolade typically shared with 1977’s Slap Shot) and an empathically comedic look at the enforcer, a position further explored in doc Ice Guardians.

Hockeyland highlights the role of the sport in a small Minnesota town. And you can’t go this long talking about hockey without mentioning Canada, as Youngblood, The Rocket 9, and Indian Horse will attest.  —Alex Vo