Not bad at all

Rating: 8/10 (15 July 2005)

Excellently told story. As usual, you should not assume this means it is perfectly faithful to history. (Russell Crowe and Ron Howard collaborated before on "A Beautiful Mind," and I now know that that was wildly inaccurate historically and scientifically--things didn't quite happen that way, and they explained Nash's theories incorrectly.) I kept thinking while watching "Cinderella": I have heard of Max Baer and Joe Louis, but Jim Braddock? I was totally surprised by the ending, which goes to show how much of a boxing buff I am (not).
Good acting by the principals, but I fear Craig Bierko will be overlooked for the Academy Award nomination he deserves for his performance as a truly scary Max Baer.
It is amusing to say that there are no tricks used to tell this story; the use of intra-psychic imagery (showing us how the character "sees" what he or she is looking at in contrast to how it would appear to the objective observer) must have been done subtly enough or else we are now trained to accept this in movies so that one can overlook it.