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
New York Post
What the film lacks in freshness...it makes up for in its sympathetic and compelling portrayal of its subjects.
70
Village Voice
Village Voice
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.
60
Chicago ReaderLisa Alspector
Chicago ReaderLisa Alspector
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.
50
San Francisco Examiner
San Francisco Examiner
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.