While never as trailblazing as its subject, The Express is a worthy addition to the lengthy canon of sports biopics.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2008

The sports-movie template is capable of absorbing any story and delivering the same uplift.

| Original Score: 3/6 | Dec 5, 2008

Full of stirring speeches and manly chins quivering with emotion, every frame is a cliché.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 5, 2008

Gary Fleder's sporting drama has its heart in the right place but, sheesh, that title grows more ironic with each crawling minute.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2008

A tidal wave of corn syrup hardly mars this old-style, populist entertainment.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2008

Steams ahead with express-train determination, scooping on to its cow-catcher any cinemagoer hoping he can outrun yet another true-life drama about black sportsmen overcoming bygone bigotry.

| Dec 5, 2008

The screenplay is stewed in such pieties, served up as warm and homely as apple pie - only there's no taste to it.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 5, 2008

A game of three halves, this jogs well into at least 30 minutes of extra time, while the screenplay so oozes with earnestness you'll be wiping the inspiration off your face.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 5, 2008

The film does the job, in its conventional way. But it's geared to throw the prime screen time in the direction of the guy playing the guy coaching the guy who's supposed to be running the movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 18, 2008

Despite appealing performances and kinetic football scenes, the storytelling is mostly conventional, except for two outstanding set pieces.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 18, 2008

The Express may prove valuable to movie historians since it's a compendium of virtually every sports movie cliché ever contrived.

| Original Score: C- | Oct 13, 2008

Consider that a virtue in a movie content to teach familiar messages without overstating them.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 10, 2008

No matter what the very capable actors do to shake up the characters, they stubbornly remain types.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 10, 2008

The player, coach and even the wise grandfather figure played by Charles S. Dutton have at least one more dimension than the typical sports-movie stereotypes.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 10, 2008

A far more intelligent movie than the ads might make it seem.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 10, 2008

As a sports non-fan, my definition of a good sports film is one that my dad and I both enjoy. The Express has the goods.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 10, 2008

Sadly, however, this is all too familiar, which is something nobody could say about the real Ernie Davis.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 10, 2008

Packages a real-life story of athletic triumph and social progress into an accessible, rousing melodrama that is no less potent for being almost entirely predictable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 10, 2008

The movie might be a bit more interesting if Davis had more to him than simply graceful gumption and victimhood, and if the spaces around him could be filled with something.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 10, 2008

At times stirring, inspiring and thoughtful.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 10, 2008