Critics reviews

The camera glides with them punch to punch, dancing around the ring like a third fighter, capturing the soul of these two men based on their strategy and viability as fighters.

Between Jordan's festering, spring-loaded performance, Stallone's reacquired affinity for minor-key character work, and Coogler's seamless refashioning of an Italian-American mythology into an African-American one, Creed not only earns its Hollywood hokum, it makes it mean something.

[Stallone] has never before been this engagingly take-me-as-I-am, which reciprocally informs Jordan's performance and Coogler's sprightly, evocative, intensely atmospheric direction with their own illuminative confidence. The difference between Creed and most pop films is that it isn't hollowly preaching of self-actualization. Instead, it physicalizes self-actualization, in all its terrifying, fragile glory

Nothing better could have been expected from the seventh film in the Rocky franchise than this flight from Hollywood back to Philadelphia. The savvy, intelligence, and heart of director Ryan Coogler's screenplay equals his achievement in getting an assignment like this after making Fruitvale Station in Oakland at age 26.

Since nostalgia for childhood favorites holds quite a lot of currency in our infantilized culture, Creed was a refreshing surprise, an entry in a successful film series that took the time and care to sculpt out a unique space for itself. Much of this had to do with cinematographer Alberti, whose collaboration with 29-year-old director Coogler made for one of the more exciting developments in mainstream American cinema in 2015.

Creed is a triumph, a joyous crowd-pleaser that somehow manages to retain the humane feel of Coogler's debut, the acclaimed, Sundance-winning 2013 indie Fruitvale Station.

[Coogler has] revitalised a seemingly decrepit movie property and elicited a little grace from the old Expendable himself, who gives a much richer performance as the elderly Rocky than he did in Rocky Balboa (2006), his own stab at a franchise coda and potential restart.

Setting aside Mr. Coogler's intelligent adjustment of the racial temperature — it's a reconsidering of the original movie rather than a rebuke — there is the rousing fact of his skill. The script takes the simple premise of an underrated light-heavyweight and doesn't oversell melodrama. Adonis is the son of Rocky's late foil-turned-friend, Apollo Creed. And there is honor in his compulsion to box. Mr. Coogler gives the compulsion emotional contour.

You can look at this two ways: Director Ryan Coogler's spectacularly fluid follow-up to his powerful debut feature Fruitvale Station, or an incredibly effective and rousing entry in a franchise that had squandered a good deal of its integrity and juice over the years. The direction and the acting are invigorating, but I was also really taken with the construction—really satisfying boxing-movie narratives aren't as common as all that these days.

At 133 minutes, Creed is a tad flabbier than necessary: a subplot concerning Rocky's fight with illness, while touching in its own right, slackens the pace. However, Coogler pulls it around for a barnstorming final act and a moving, understated denouement.

Whoever was ultimately responsible for the idea of having Rocky Balboa reluctantly manage Apollo Creed's son—and the film's long development saga suggests that it may have been Stallone—deserves the proverbial pat on the back, as it's a shift loaded with enough series-historic and racial and cultural significance to make even casual viewers sit bolt upright with interest, to say nothing of fans.

While Coogler's style is generally either functional or predictable (there's a bit of slow-motion running straight out of his earlier Fruitvale Station), he reveals unexpected chops with ambitious, circling Steadicam moves, including one fight that he and DP Maryse Alberti (The Wrestler) capture in a single take.