A tale of life at the foot of the slopes, French-Swiss director Ursula Meier’s follow-up to her likeably askew debut Home finds her once again zeroing in on an unusual domestic set-up. This time the focus is on a dysfunctional family, perilously pared down to just a 12-year-old boy and his irresponsible adult sister, who are scraping by on the money generated by the youngster’s gift for theft.

It has never been easier to get sucked into a warm, simplistic sensibility which portrays every rich capitalist businessman as corrupt and amoral, but you spend 90 minutes watching Donald Trump in action and you start to wonder. If Trump didn't exist you suspect Martin Amis would invent him. He would probably call his caricature of a dastardly US business tycoon Donald Shit.

“It was almost undescribable but I’ll give it a go.” Anyone from the group of athletes we have come to know as Team GB might have given voice to the thought, but the words happened to belong to Ed McKeever, one of the less charismatic of the freshly medalled guests to take his place on Gary Lineker’s sofa. Lineker, offering nightly sessions as some sort of entry-level shrink to the nation, spent the Olympic Games asking people to describe how they feel. It was a thankless gig, but someone had to keep popping the question. “Unbelievable, Gary,” they'd all say.

There’s a lot of sport about at the minute, and those of us who get off on it are filling our boots. So it’s perhaps not the ideal moment to release a sporting documentary, however rousing, however laudable, especially one about that most unOlympic of team games, US football. If Undefeated makes a legitimate claim on the attention, it’s because it is all about legacy, that ubiquitous buzz word of London 2012.

As a director François Ozon perpetually confounds, with a string of diverse films to his name (the intense 5X2 and the gambolling Potiche to name but two) and this effort from 2002 is characteristically capricious - is it crisp, contemplative drama, eroticism or thriller? In Swimming Pool former provocateur Charlotte Rampling finds her peace shattered, her sensuality re-awakened and her robust beauty upstaged by the brazen Ludivine Sagnier.

Football and film: what is that? Let’s agree that it has not always been the happiest relationship. If you’ve observed Brian Clough’s brief encounter with the Leeds squad in The Damned United, you'll get the picture. They really ought to be best mates, both being forms of mass entertainment. They have the same values, dreams and indeed time frame: 90 minutes or thereabouts (depends who's reffing/directing). And at their most venal they both pray at the altar of profit. Somehow, though, they just don’t click.

Uncontrollable mirth is the response of many onlookers to the Olympic spectacle of synchronised swimming, though it is (they say) a discipline which demands formidable strength and technical accuracy. Be that as it may, it probably wouldn't exist without Australian swimmer, vaudevillian and movie star Annette Kellerman, who was credited with inventing synchronised swimming after she performed the world's first water ballet in a glass tank at the New York Hippodrome in 1907.

What of the star sportsman whose glory days are behind him? It seems an absurd question to pose, with the sun barely set on the theatrics of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, but for Randy “The Ram” Robinson it’s everyday existentialism.

As London 2012 finally settles into the blocks for its two-week dash after seven years of preparation, the British Library has cast a nostalgic look back to the two previous Olympiads hosted by the city, in 1908 and 1948. The story the images tell is of the changing face of the Olympics. Once upon a time amateurism unquestioningly held sway and intensely focused athletes didn't sneer at Baron de Coubertin's long-lost concept that it's the taking part that counts and the notion of sponsorship was still a twinkle in Lausanne's eye.

Nearly there. In one more day the phoney Games will be over and the real drama can begin. For the past weeks the television schedules have jostled with documentaries about past Olympians and current ones, while Chariots of Fire has been going for gold in both the theatre and the multiplex. There was just time last night for one final Olympic story to be smuggled under the wire. The remit of Bert and Dickie seemed clear: to remind us that we’ve done all this before, in much more trying circumstances, and the whole thing united the nation in a warm glow. So there.