A touching film full of spirit and hope.

Rating: 9/10 (15 July 2002)

ROCKY tells a familiar rags-to-riches story that has that amazing thing about it that no matter how many times you've seen the film, it's always engaging, uplifting and hopeful. Sylvester Stallone wrote it while his acting career had slowly started becoming a dead-end, and he realized a story that reflected his own with Rocky "The Italian Stallion" Balboa, a promising small-time boxer that threw it all away and wanders the streets serving the local loan-shark as collector. Boxing champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) decides to face off an unknown in his New Year bout and picks Rocky, which gives the Italian Stallion one last shot at glory. What Stallone truly understood while writing this film, is that to make such a fairy-tale work he had to capture it realistically, and it had to be captured emotionally. He and director John G. Avildson managed both; the dirty streets and corners of Philadelphia paints Rocky's character along his tender romance with Adrian (Talia Shire), his relationship with her brother Paulie (Burt Young) and his own grizzled coach Mickey (Burgess Meredith). ROCKY stands tall alongside Scorsese's RAGING BULL (1980) as the best boxing- film of all time.