There has never been made a good football movie, cause the game is to hard to transform into the big screen, but there has been made some great movies about whats going on outside of the pitch e.g. The Football Factory. The Damned United is all about the charismatic Brian Clough and his rivalry with the legendary Don Revie. Tom Hooper combines fiction with actual footage in a great manner and Michael Sheen is excellent. As we speak Leeds are on their way back where they belong and thank god!

Great scenes, powerful acting, fun script..i would never imagine that i could enjoy a movie on football...i believe im a tom hooper fan now..interesting to see that this movie is clearly better than kings speech:)

Hooper's direction is great though he tends to craft too simple a narrative for it to stick with you. I'm not a fan of sports films and this wouldn't be an exception but for the fact that it contains Sheen's most entertaining performance yet.

"The parallel-tracks structure smoothly reveals cause-effect relationships even as it sometimes feels designed to gussy up the narrative's straightforward rise-and-fall arc." - Nick Schager

I can think of nothing in the world that I care less about than soccer or football or whatever it's called nowadays. Thankfully, this film isn't really about sports. It's all about manager Brian Clough, played mesmerizingly by Sheen. "It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it", says the wise Roger Ebert; and this is certainly true of both 'The Damned United' and 'The King's Speech' by Hooper. In these two movies he shows terrific feel for pacing and aesthetic choices. Entertaining.

Solid, entertaining sports drama. Even without any background knowledge about the people or events in the film I was quickly drawn in to the characters.

Much better than most sports movies. I would have liked more focus on Timothy Spall's character, who is more interesting than his megalomaniac partner. I only play the game, I do not follow professional teams or the history of professional teams. And still I thought it was a good film overall though hardcore fans of English football will probably appreciate it more.

Great film about a great football manager. I loved this but then i love football. May not be for everyones taste but i know the mans accomplishments and appreciated this film.

85.750

I don't know much of anything about soccer (and honestly don't care to learn), but The Damned United is still a damned fine film. This is more a character study of club manager Brian Clough than your typical underdog sports story, and Clough is a fascinatingly flawed man played to perfection by Michael Sheen. Meaney and Spall make Sheen's job easy, providing strong sparring partners for him to play off of, but the film is built on the back of Sheen's performance. No surprise, they're both great.

It relies fairly heavily on nostalgia and will appeal to people who grew up watching football in the 70s. Mudbath pitches, short shorts, mid-match punch-ups and players with perms. Those were the days. The narrative was a bit simplistic, though. The Leeds players were little more than pantomime villains, and for all of Clough's arrogance to be blamed on one perceived snub by Revie was a bit of a let-down. There was room for a much deeper exploration of what made such a complex character tick.

Sheen really sells this.

Deep Purple and Michael Sheen.