News

MaryAnn’s quick take… Covers ground — the lives of black teen girls — that mostly goes unexamined onscreen. It couldn’t be fresher or more important. It’s also wildly entertaining. I’m “biast” (pro): I’m desperate for movies about girls and women

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

Forget those silly Step Up movies. Even though they are set in the world of hip-hop street-dance competitions that are primarily an “urban” — read: black — phenomenon, they manage to focus almost entirely on white characters. Instead, here’s Step, which is literally the real thing. Hugely cheering and cheer-worthy, this documentary look at a high-school girls’ step team covers so much ground that unforgivably goes mostly unexamined onscreen: it couldn’t be fresher or more important. It’s also wildly entertaining while simultaneously enormously enlightening.

Movies about at-risk boys are plentiful.

Tayla Solomon and the “Lethal Ladies of Blysw”. Photo by Jay L. Clendenin. Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures. © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

The inspirational documentary Step follows a girls’ step dance team at a Baltimore charter high school, both in their quest to win a big step dance competition and to get into college.

The story takes place in 2015, the shadow of the unrest and protests that gripped Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray, and the documentary has echoes of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter as well. All of the girls in this documentary are African-American and low-income, but they are lucky in one way: their high school, which has a staff devoted to their success, Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women was founded in 2009 as a small girls-only high school with the mission to get every one of its low-income students into college.

Director...