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 ...

He's had his fair share of dangerous call-outs, and time and again his wife has had reason to worry about him. But after all, it's his job to save people and run into burning buildings when everyone ...

When you make a movie like “Ladder 49,” about the day-to-day lives of firemen, almost anything you do runs the risk of being exploitative. It’s hard to know the right way — or even if there is a right ...

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 ...

One of the most enduring images in the weeks and months after Sept. 11, 2001, centered on the cleanup at the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers at Ground Zero. As the tons of debris were ...