Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Patrick Brennan ★★★ 1

  This is a movie in which Tom Waits and Sylvester Stallone have a conversation.

• 

  Review by FakeVoorhees ★★

  Sylvester Stallone has talked about how he was forced to edit a lot out of this movie by the studio. My question is why the hell did they not only let him keep the Sly-sung theme song in but also let it play over both the opening and closing credits?

• 

  Review by John_Lehtonen 3

  Posting here a piece I wrote on Stallone for a book that went unpublished. It's more a career-retrospective than a piece about this wonderful film (although it's in there), but I figured this was good a home as any. I don't necessarily agree with everything I wrote here, but I like the piece, and if you're an old Sly fan like myself, you may get something out of it.

  
  The earnest nature of Sylvester Stallone’s work as a filmmaker belies a rather complicated, and curious, relationship with personae, as well as a persistent fascination with iconography. As a director and writer, Stallone is a self-professed storyteller: he writes what he feels are classical, character-driven narratives. This characteristic is irrefutable, but…

• 

  Review by Cinema_Strikes ★★★ 8

  Stallone writes and directs the hell out of this sports dramedy about three scrappy Italian brothers (Stallone, Armand Assante, and actual boxer Lee Canalito), but it’s handicapped by so many weird and poor choices, most cripplingly the casting of Stallone himself as the hustling, motor mouthed Cosmo. The role needs a James Woods or a Mickey Rourke, Stallone can’t keep up with his own dialogue.

  I do really like the final wrestling scene, Canalito and Terry Funk really sell it and are both athletes who can pull off serious moves. Actually, Canalito gets most of the good scenes, the fights, his climactic trip up the stairs with the ice block, his romance with Aimee Eccles.

  But again, the bad choices:…

• 

  Review by Bruno Andrade ★★★½ 3

  Preâmbulo:

  após reproduzir e vulgarizar o que há de mais estanque no espólio da crítica francesa, tem gente querendo meter as mãos na ideia de crítica inclusiva do Frye para fazer ainda mais lambança.

  Lembrando que:

  "tudo" não significa "qualquer coisa";

  "crítica inclusiva" não implica "aleatoriedade de gosto".

  --------------------

  Belíssimo exemplo de generosidade crítica e de crítica compreensiva, um primeiro passo inevitável para uma prática consequente de crítica inclusiva, centrando-se no que há de melhor e de essencial (eu ainda acrescentaria Oscar do Landis) na obra artística do Stallone.

  --------------------

  Sabemos o que Eustache achava de Rocky e o que Pialat achava de First Blood; podemos suspeitar igualmente o que Brisseau achava desses filmes.

  Além de Carax e Daney, citados…

• 

  Review by matt lynch ★★★½

  extra half star for cameos by Ted DiBiase, Dick Murdoch, Ray Stevens, and of course Terry Funk.

• 

  Review by Matt Singer ★★★½ 2

  Although it bears plenty of similarities to ROCKY (wrestling in place of boxing tied to working class dreams; a storyline that builds to a big fight where the outcome is much less important than the personal stakes for the characters) this is very different from Stallone's other movies of the period (or his whole career, frankly). Almost qualifies as a candidate for my boss Scott Tobias' Departures column.

  I'm not sure the wrestling component is entirely successful, and holy lord the Sylvester Stallone sung theme song is hilariously bad. But otherwise this a very solid period drama. A nice surprise.

• 

  Review by Hmel ★★½

  As the opening credits began, I started to notice that the singing voice sounded familiar, yet out of place, and a trickle of sweat began to creep down my back, as I slowly realize Stallone was going for more than just the directing, writing, and acting credit.

  Paradise Alley, feels like a made for TV movie, and was written, directed, and stars Sylvester Stallone. I thought I may need to turn on captions at the start but my ear settled in and I began to, like only a mother can with their toddler, process Sly's dialogue much quicker.

  I wasn't particularly enthralled with the writing and the film featured dialogue that sounded exactly like I would expect it to, knowing…

• 

  Review by Tyler ★½ 2

  Absolutely awful, just irredeemably bad. I can’t believe Stallone penned this flop, then turned around and wrote Rocky. There’s just so many subplots that go nowhere. What the fuck happened to the monkey? Did they eat it? Why the fuck is one of the brothers wearing Genoa salmi as a vest during his fights? Paradise Alley, was written as a serious drama but there’s so many goofy and dumb as hell parts that just don’t mesh with the overarching plot. We literally get slapstick comedy of a guy attempting to commit suicide and it’s played for jokes, then five seconds later the same character drowns himself.

• 

  Review by Robert Franco

  ”you lose this fight, we’re finished. we’re garbage again, do you understand this?”
  ”i was never garbage.”

• 

  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★½ 9

  Overwhelming the way certain Indian movies are, a crazy triumph (almost) of art-direction and excess. It's impossible to fault the detailed world-building, but the world created onscreen is the memory of 1940s movies made tangible, turned into a concrete space the characters can inhabit; it's never more real than that fantasy of a memory of a fantasy, and that seems to be deliberate -- at its wildest, the set designs look like nothing so much as Kautner's Grosse Freiheit No7.

  If They Shoot Horses Don't They had been constructed to end with a setpiece where two testosterone-poisoned freaks try to kill each other, it might have been this movie. I wish it didn't retreat, at the very end, from the…

• 

  Review by seanoconnz ★★★½

  Stallone wrote, starred, directed, and sang the theme song. No notes.