On the Ropes

A sports documentary as gripping, in a different way, as "Hoop Dreams."

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.

The documentary has no narration, and uses excellent expository camerawork to say things that no narrator could equal.

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.

What the film lacks in freshness...it makes up for in its sympathetic and compelling portrayal of its subjects.

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.

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.