After watching “Ladder 49,” you will never complain about moving to the side of the road to make room for a fire truck. The new movie is the most polished of recruiting films. But that doesn’t mean it ...

While Sept. 11 helped embellish the already heroic image of firefighters, "Ladder 49" doesn't owe any direct debt to such recent events. It plays, rather, like an old-fashioned, by-the-numbers drama ...

In the film, Joaquin stars as Jack Morrison, a fireman who begins to reassess the physical toll and low pay his high-risk job requires due to his wife and kids. Despite the encouragement of his mentor ...

Actor Tim Guinee didn't want to leave the fire service behind after filming "Ladder 49," so he took on the role of a firefighter in real life. Guinee joined his hometown Stone Ridge Volunteer Fire ...

Director Jay Russell’s edict on Ladder 49, his 9-11-inflected tribute to the workaday lives of firefighters, was to keep the blazes as furiously lifelike as possible. Visceral, pulsating and intensely ...

Xpress' 6th grade reviewer offers her thoughts on Pixar's latest gem. I don’t know when I’ve seen a movie so completely smug in its belief that its audience is on a par with Pavlov’s dogs. Ladder 49 ...

The shadow of Sept. 11 looms large over every flickering frame of Ladder 49. Being that there hasn’t been a big-budget film based on firefighters since Ron Howard’s Backdraft, nearly 15 years ago, ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. They are willing to lay their time, energy and lives on the line to protect the property and ...

The problem with this film is that it's hardly a film, more an extended promo for the American firemen. And any advertisement stretching on for two hours will always be a bit too hard to take. Of ...

It's loud. It's noisy. It's downright cacophonous. That being the case, I'm led to wonder if turning up the volume is a director's ploy to draw an audience's attention away from corny melodrama. Is ...