“The Smashing Machine” starts with a long montage of fighter Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) pounding and wailing on various opponents. The camera is oddly divorced from the action, but there’s no denying ...

From "Rocky" to "Rush," so many sports movies, whether they're about boxing, racing or any number of athletic competitions, are often about the glory of victory and the arduous journey to get there.

In the opening scene of “The Smashing Machine,” Benny Safdie’s bracing, clear-eyed, and laceratingly humane sports biopic, we see grainy staged video footage of Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson), the mixed ...

The following contains spoilers for The Smashing MachineThe Smashing Machine is just the latest sports movie to fall into a frustrating sports movie trope. The Smashing Machine is a structurally ...

Credits: Directed by Benny Safdie, starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten, Lindsey Gavin and Oleksandr Usyk. Rating/runtime: R for language and some drug abuse; 123 minutes. How ...