On Pointe

Okay, so the dancing part is good, real dancers, thank god! The acting, on the other hand, is horrible - so stiff, they all sound like robots. The mother is absolutely horrible, I usually have sympathy for "bad" characters, but I had none for her, she's just not a good character.. at all. I do, however, like the "storyline" in general, but it could've been a lot better with the right actors!

A real ballerina. A beautiful dancer. That's all that is good about the movie. If the whole movie had Juliet Doherty dancing then it would have been far better. Problem is none of the actors are believable. The script is redundant in such a way that the characters are all the same with same expressions.

You can tell most of the actors in the movie have no experience acting. You can tell who the professional actors are like Kaitlyn Black, the mother, and Asher Angel, the brother. All the acting is so wooden that it makes one not care about the story.

It's too bad for the premise of the story was good to begin with.

The main character is a beautiful dancer, but the acting is awful. The characters who don't have to dance were horrible actors which doesn't make sense because they didn't need to compromise on that. I guess it's the directing too. It's very slow moving and I almost shut it off. I also didn't like how the character doesn't eat. That should have been addressed. I expected her to faint or something, but nope. Not cool. Also the mother makes no sense. If she never had a job or did anything with her life then why on earth didn't she watch her daughter dance? You'd think she'd want her daughter to have opportunities-the whole fear of failure thing on the mom's end made no sense to me. The mom also seemed super young. 36? Real enough but wow my mom was like 50 when I was that age. Anyhow I feel like teenagers will like it. It's like a step up from the American girl movies and it's clean enough.

Firstly, the dancer is stunning. I wasn't sure if they were using a body double for the dance scenes as no one can be that good looking and that talented - surely? But no, it seems like she acts and she dances. And her acting is OK. She's pretty flat but that's her character, a slightly sulky dance-obsessed teenager.

Also, the little brother is a great actor - he should go far and seems to be overlooked in all the reviews.

As for the movie, there were lots of strands that didn't quite add up, many of which have been called out by other reviews. Why was the mum so convinced that her daughter would never make the grade to go pro? We needed to see how her own dreams had been crushed as a kid to make her so brutally realistic. And why would the mum agree to go to a sleazy pick-up joint after work with her colleagues? If this is where they always go wouldn't they have warned her? And what is with the two dancers who look at each other all the time? And why doesn't the math tutor make a move? A kiss followed by him leaving HER to follow HIS dream would have been more surprising rather than 'hey, good for you, I'm off too'.

As for everything else, I get that dad has left, mum has never had to work, dad bought the daughter's car and paid for the upmarket lifestyle and that his departure has left mum in pieces. And I get that two Bs is not the end of the world but it's realistic - not everything has to be a drama.The anorexia thing is possibly realistic too - films don't have a responsibility to show the world as it should be, this one shows it perhaps more as it is.

The director obviously coerced a mate to provide songs for the entire soundtrack - no doubt for budgetary reasons but a bit more variety / subtlety might have worked.

Throughout, I couldn't help thinking that, if this film had been made in France in the late eighties /early nineties and had starred Emmanuelle Béart, it would have been considered art house and would have been much better received. The pace and minimal plot felt very French.

Still, the director not only got this made, she got Netflix to buy it. Kudos!

A beautiful, talented, spectacularly smart young woman has dedicated her life to dance. Everyone envies her. Her dance instructor may or may not have a candle-lit shrine to her in the back of his studio. She drives a brand new Lexus despite the fact that she isn't out of high school. She is perfection incarnate.

She has no friends, because who would want to be friends with a beautiful, talented, spectacularly smart young woman with a hot car. Her most vicious enemy is her psychotically spiteful mother, who is mysteriously only five years older than she is.

But then, tragedy! Life comes crashing down around her after she gets a couple of B's on her math. Yes, B's. Suddenly she is forced to give up dance forever, ostensibly because they have no money (the Lexus must be a lease) but mostly because her mother literally hates her. Then her dad announces he wants a divorce, and no one can be surprised why.

Luckily her math tutor is the same age as she is, hunky, and plays a soulful guitar. That's as far as I got before this epic tale of a privileged white girl crashing into the depths of slightly less privilege made me run from the room weeping at the injustice of this cold, uncaring universe.