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On the Ropes
Metascore
80 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 13 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 11 out of 13
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 13
  3. Negative: 0 out of 13
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  1. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    100
    A sports documentary as gripping, in a different way, as "Hoop Dreams."
  2. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Peter Stack
    100
    Exceptional, powerful new documentary.
  3. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Charles Taylor
    90
    Walking out of the theater, I felt so bereft that I couldn't speak. And it doesn't hurt any less thinking about the movie now, as I write this.
  4. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: David Davis
    90
    Jolts with a quiet intimacy.
  5. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Matt Williams
    89
    The documentary has no narration, and uses excellent expository camerawork to say things that no narrator could equal.
  6. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Renee Graham
    88
    Has the impact of a left-right combination to the chin.
  7. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kevin Thomas
    80
    In recording life as it unfolds in the course of a year, On the Ropes not only defies prediction as to its outcome but is in some ways downright confounding...as involving and suspenseful as the best fictional films.
  8. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Rod Dreher
    75
    What the film lacks in freshness...it makes up for in its sympathetic and compelling portrayal of its subjects.
  9. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Paula Nechak
    75
    Isn't so emotionally powerful as the Oscar-winning "When We Were Kings" but which -- in its more intimate way -- still packs a punch.
  10. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    70
    Often technically rough, but it's painfully compelling.
  11. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Gary Dauphin
    70
    Burstein and Morgen take all this in from an unobtrusive middle distance, letting the subjects themselves slowly complicate the profusion of athletic and ghetto-real clichés that fly scattershot in the early going.
  12. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Lisa Alspector
    60
    The material is powerful--one boxer has been accused of a crime and the trial conflicts with a crucial competition--but much of it feels predigested, the themes inadvertently one-dimensional.
  13. San Francisco Examiner
    Reviewed by: Edvins Beitiks
    50
    The story of a trainer and three of his boxers trying to break away from the confines of a gym in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Each story is strong, gripping in its own way. But you've heard them all before.
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