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(Entertainment Weekly) -- In the world of the dance movie, life is stripped down to the honesty of bodies in motion and a rhythm-dictated intimacy that can't be denied. There's usually a class factor, a competitive element, a disapproving authority figure, or perhaps all three.
"Step Up" -- "Fame" on "Beat Street," played against the grim West Bawlmer canvas of "The Wire" -- tips its backward ball cap to those elements. (Indeed, the core story has been recycled by writer Duane Adler from his own "Save the Last Dance.") But "Step," under the sure hand of director-choreographer Anne Fletcher, quickly discovers its own virtuoso charms.
Two of them are its leads: Channing Tatum as budding criminal Tyler -- all slot eyes and thug shrugs until he hits the dance floor -- and Jenna Dewan as Nora, a rich kid shooting for that elusive chance to dance.
The meet-cute: When Nora's partner is injured, Tyler, who's trudging through some court-ordered janitorial work, convinces her he can sub. But "Step" doesn't dwell on class-crossed romance: It's more concerned with the pirouetting mini-betrayals and miracle catches of partnership.
Tatum has a bracing rectangular naturalness and easy chemistry with the lithe Dewan, on the floor and off. Their dance styles never really jell, and the movie is lazy-vague on the actual art form, privileging will over skill. But the pair is fused by the film's pulsing energy, which is both sincere and irresistible.
EW Grade: B
'Half Nelson'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
"Half Nelson" offers an opportunity to marvel, once again, at the dazzling talent of Ryan Gosling for playing young men as believable as they are psychologically trip-wired.
In a performance spectacular and "invisible" at the same time, the Canadian-born former child actor, who blew the roof off five years ago as a neo-Nazi in "The Believer" (and then went on to make "The Notebook" halfway palatable), stars as Dan Dunne, a charismatic, dedicated inner-city Brooklyn junior high school teacher by day.
By night, though, he's something else -- just another white, middle-class crackhead.
Dan, in other words, is a disaster waiting to happen, and a heartbreaker, too: He cares about his kids (most of them African-American) with the fervor of a valiant inner-city educator -- but with none of the cliche heroics we've seen throughout "Stand and Deliver" history. Instead, when he wastes himself at night, he's a wreck the next day, too (both in the classroom and in the gym where he coaches basketball).
And that vulnerability doesn't go unnoticed by Drey (newcomer Shareeka Epps, a poised, powerful match for Gosling's intensity), a prematurely wise 13-year-old who has seen drug dealing up close in her own family.
There's no easy way out of Dan's self-imposed headlock of self-destruction and disillusionment. "Half Nelson" conspicuously offers no tidy resolution or concluding uplift, which only makes the movie that much more trustworthy, and the unflashy, documentary-style filmmaking more artful.
Working from a script he co-wrote with Anna Boden (shot three years ago as a short called "Gowanus, Brooklyn"), first-time feature director Ryan Fleck keeps the story low to the ground, organic, honest.
In response, every choice the star makes is fresh, from the way his Dan rubs his bloodshot eyes to how he attempts to straighten up his crummy apartment. Without ever appearing to act, Gosling is the most exciting actor of his generation.
EW Grade: A
'Another Gay Movie'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
It's got four horny high school seniors who make a pact to lose their virginity. It's got a video-voyeur scene and a quiche masturbation scene (don't ask). It's got gerbil jokes, S&M jokes, a take-what-little-is-left-of-my-dignity cameo by Richard Hatch, and enough sploshing bodily fluids to gross out the most jaded teen-comedy enthusiast.
What "Another Gay Movie" doesn't have is a message, and that, it turns out, is a good thing. I mean, really, when was the last time you saw a gay movie that was liberated from all socially redeeming value?
With its punky-pink tinsel-and-Colorforms decor, its stylized acting that turns teen stereotypes into camp and then back again, "Another Gay Movie" is "American Pie" restaged as a debauched queer in-joke.
The movie isn't a parody, exactly. It's clear that the director, Todd Stephens ("Edge of Seventeen"), grew up watching mainstream teen flicks, and that he identified with them, too. He stages "Another Gay Movie" in a style of low-budget fluorescent overkill, but a handful of the gags are low-down funny, and I got caught up in the freshness of Stephens' transmutation of trashy straight youth culture into trashy gay youth culture.
His heroes, like the sprightly geek Griff (Mitch Morris) and the Liza-eyed, cockatoo-haired club-kid mama's boy Nico (Jonah Blechman), have no angst about being gay, but they vent their insecurity by coming on as sexual "tops"; they have to -- how can I say this? -- embrace their inner bottom. Maybe that is a message, but a nicely unredeeming one.
EW Grade: B
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