NEW YORK REVIEW
In this entrancing, funny, and moving documentary, contemporary kids of many social and ethnic backgrounds shimmy their self-conscious hips to the merengue, swing music, the rumba, the tango, and the fox-trot. Ballroom follows a New York City public-school-system program that teaches fifth-grade students ballroom dancing, and the film climaxes with a citywide competition that’ll have you rising from your seat to root for your favorites. First-time director Marilyn Agrelo leads us like a good dance partner: Her cameras capture the drama of rehearsals, her subjects’ alternately hilarious and heartbreaking after-school chatter about their ambitions, dreams, and everyday frustrations; she even sketches vivid portraits of the students’ dance teachers (memo to Hollywood producers: Suave, witty Rodney Lopez at P.S. 115 in Washington Heights is already a more magnetic screen presence than two- thirds of the current male movie stars we’re subjected to). The winning school is never in doubt, but it doesn’t lessen the pleasurable tension and suspense—you’ll waltz out of Mad Hot Ballroom not merely exhilarated but with renewed respect for after-school programs and the work that teachers can do in children’s lives. — Reviewed by Ken Tucker, New York Magazine
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