If only boxing in real life was this exciting. The fights in this film are filmed to absolute perfection. They're intense, brutal, and down right raw. Floyd Mayweather should watch this movie and then maybe he'll actually learn how to fight an exciting fight.

I am very impressed with director Ryan Cooler. He knocked his first film, Fruitvale Station out of the park and he has now knocked his second film, Creed out of the park. I cannot wait to see what he does next. You'd think this man has been behind the camera for years with the quality of his first two films.

The performances are what really make this movie. Yes, the fight scenes are incredible. But this…

Creed succeeds on so many different levels. It is a sports movie with a heart of a champion. It is a movie about the relationship between a father and a son. It introduces us to Michael B Jordan's Adonis Johnson and allows him to develop his own story; all while having the legend himself, Rocky Balboa along for the ride in a moving and gut wrenching supporting role. It is emotional and might just bring tears to your eyes.

Gloves off to Michael B Jordan. He looks and acts the part of a boxer. All the boxing choreography is near flawless. The casting of professional boxers helps, a lot. The training montages are Rocky-esque. What I really like is the…

Don't let the lack of a 6/5 fool you...I FUCKING LOVED Creed.

"That bell doesn't mean you're dismissed. That bell means hell."

I went into it expecting to be moved, but it's been some time since a film has wetted my cheek so thoroughly.

"What's wrong with your eyes?" -- Terminator 2 quote about crying

(A stupid question coming from a machine with "detailed files on human anatomy.")

This awards season, I hope Oscar voters will be stroking Stallone's shaft and cupping his balls**, because he deserves it.

** Via Urban Dictionary: Actor Sylvester Stalone's instructions to a young female production assistant.

Common phrase used casually (by crew mostly) in the Vancouver film community. Derived from the true story of…

*previously an 80, now a 94*

The glory of Hollywood redefined and resurrected via a humanistic, compassionate lens. Johnson/Creed: it says it all; Coogler merging the old and the new together into one moving populist spectacle. Can't help but constantly tear up during the final 30 minutes, as the myth-making never resorts to fan-service, propelling history on a fast track to collision with the modern. There's such a swift attention to montage and how the preparation for physical showmanship requires just as much effort if not more so, especially when the claim for prideful heritage is on the line. Thinking about that final run within the city, an entire generation rising to claim something as their own, lets the waterfalls…

It's not supposed to be this way. Hollywood reboots are unilaterally terrible, cash ins, whitewashed garbage that plays up the cheapest aspects of the originals, matches it beat for beat but only in the shallowest possible way, ignoring the thematic resonance that made it great in the first place. Yet, here we are, something that takes the fundamental underdog story of the original and builds upon it in a way that makes it more complex, modern, and re-invigorated, in a way that speaks to new audiences, yet still capturing what made the original a good film. Having been so long since I saw Rocky, it's hard for me to do a, ahem, blow-by-blow comparison, but no matter: the feeling of…

80/100

Ryan Coogler's Creed is bone-chilling, both in its rousing emotion and its quiet reverberations across a detailed history of Boxing cinema. Tremendous style is woven into a superbly crafted genre piece, and the quiet moments are just as poignant as its various beat-by-beat story points. You know this narrative, but you haven't seen it told with such heartrending delicacy.

Coming off of 2013's excellent Fruitvale Station, Coogler and Jordan prove themselves to be a team of dexterity and deep-rooted understanding. Along with Sylvester Stallone's Oscar-Worthy performance as an aged and weathered Balboa, the highlight of Creed comes from the unwavering versatility from every player involved. This is a carefully told and bittersweet opera, and Coogler avoids any sense of…

Adonis Johnson, the out-of-wedlock son of the late boxing champion Apollo Creed, is taken home and raised by Creed's widow as her own child. When he grows up he decides to follow his father's footsteps and become a boxer. So he travels from Los Angeles to Philadelphia and asks for help from Apollo's former friend and rival, Rocky Balboa.

Say what you want about writer/director Ryan Coogler but one thing is certain: this guy has balls to match his talent. He took a franchise that seemed dead and buried and revived it in a spectacular way. Visually arresting and emotionally volatile, "Creed" is a movie that looks furtively to the past but with both its feet planted firmly into the…

61/100

Spent the first half thinking it was adhering a bit too strictly to formula, but it kept slugging (note boxing metaphor!) and ultimately won me over, for the most part. Coogler does a superlative job with both of the big fight sequences—one beautifully choreographed unbroken shot for the first, which functions almost like a dance; a disorienting flurry of cuts for the climatic slugfest—and coaxes a genuinely soulful, dignified performance from Stallone (though I still miss the original conception of Rocky Balboa as barely articulate). Large-scale predictability is balanced by small-scale specificity, e.g. Bianca's progressive hearing loss (which has no narrative or metaphorical function, as far as I can tell—miraculous) and Donnie's abrupt onset of gastrointestinal distress seconds before…