Red Army

Produced by Werner Herzog, Gabe Polsky's first solo documentary offers a fascinating insight into the link between sport and politics in the Soviet Union by focusing on the achievements of the near-invincible ice-hockey team nicknamed the Big Red Machine. Making sparingly effective use of archive footage, Polsky wisely exploits his access to such titans as Slava Fetisov, who was the figurehead of the Green Unit drawn from the formidable CSKA Moscow squad that transformed the sport from the mid-1950s. There's a compelling contrast between the coaching methods of Anatoli Tarasov (whose tactical genius derived from chess and ballet) and Viktor Tikhonov, a martinet apparatchik who was instructed to rebuild the team after its shock defeat to some American rookies at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. There's also a delicious irony in the fact that Fetisov, who caused uproar when he was allowed to "defect" to play in the National Hockey League, later became Vladimir Putin's sports minister. But this wry and revealing account is full of such quirky anecdotes, which are illuminated with slick poster-art graphics.