Critic Reviews
| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Exceptional, powerful new documentary.
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| 100 |
Chicago Sun-Times
A sports documentary as gripping, in a different way, as "Hoop Dreams."
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| 90 |
Salon.com
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.
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| 90 |
LA Weekly
David Davis
Jolts with a quiet intimacy.
|
| 89 |
Austin Chronicle
Matt Williams
The documentary has no narration, and uses excellent expository camerawork to say things that no narrator could equal.
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| 88 |
Boston Globe
Renee Graham
Has the impact of a left-right combination to the chin.
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| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
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.
|
| 75 |
New York Post
Rod Dreher
What the film lacks in freshness...it makes up for in its sympathetic and compelling portrayal of its subjects.
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| 75 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Isn't so emotionally powerful as the Oscar-winning "When We Were Kings" but which -- in its more intimate way -- still packs a punch.
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| 70 |
TV Guide
Often technically rough, but it's painfully compelling.
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| 70 |
Village Voice
Gary Dauphin
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.
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| 60 |
Chicago Reader
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.
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| 50 |
San Francisco Examiner
Edvins Beitiks
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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