Christy (2025) Movie Review: Brazen Oscar Plea

Sydney Sweeney transforms into a boxing pioneer in David Michôd’s Christy, a real-life drama shamelessly engineered to attract Academy attention.

Sydney Sweeney plays Christy Martin (née Salters) across several decades, from her humble beginnings in West Virginia to the top of the female boxing world. Originally a basketball player, her victory in a strongwoman competition garners the attention of a local boxing trainer, who quickly realises he has something special on his hands. Cue a move to Florida, a change of coach, and the beginning of a historic career as one of the greatest ever professional female boxers. Along the way, she struggles through toxic relationships, drug addiction and a fight for fair pay as she almost single-handedly puts the women’s sport on the map. 

Sweeney’s performance will be the one on everybody’s lips, and not without good reason; her physical transformation is pretty remarkable and Christy’s brash attitude and propensity for foul language are quite the gear change from the star’s demure public persona. She’s especially endearing as the plucky teen discovering that boxing is ‘her thing’, with a precious look of disbelief on her face each time her arm is raised to signal another win, but inhabits the character convincingly through every phase of her life. All that said, there’s nothing Sweeney does here that tops Margot Robbie’s turn as the similarly cocksure sportswoman Tonya Harding in 2017’s I, Tonya.

Ben Foster is appropriately sleazy as Jim Martin, Christy’s coach and then husband (25 years her senior), whose tough love approach in the ring descends into outright physical and emotional abuse at home. When our protagonist seeks help from her Christian conservative mother (Merritt Wever), the latter is just happy she isn’t dating women anymore and sides with Jim. She only appears in a handful of scenes, but Wever is a chilling presence. Chad L. Coleman is on hand with some much-needed comic relief, playing the renowned boxing promoter Don King. His Eddie Murphy-esque performance seems to have spilled over from a different film entirely, one that I’d happily watch.

The fights and training montages are perfectly well shot; boxing is one of the most cinematic sports after all, and the oppressiveness of Christy’s home life is conveyed through smart lighting and a foreboding score from Antony Partos. Aesthetically speaking, there’s no moment when the film puts a notable step wrong, but its obsessive safeness is what renders it so lifeless at times. When the marriage takes an even darker turn in the final act, the violence is partially obscured in the name of good taste and the effect muted. It’s shocking stuff of course, but I’d have felt just as much revulsion if I’d read an account of events on Wikipedia instead.

It’s a good thing Christy boasts such a strong cast, who just about overcome a flaccid script and tame visual direction. This textbook inspirational story feels blatantly engineered to attract Academy attention, and yet may still fall short in the age of Everything Everywhere All At Once and Anora. While the story of Christy Martin is well worth telling, a game changer like her deserves something more radical than this.

David Michôd’s Christy (2025) was screened at TIFF on September 5, 2025 and will be released in US theatres on November 7, 2025. In the U.K., the film will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 17.