Dance First

The emotional acuity of a writer who felt things too deeply to stoop to cheap sentiment comes through.

Dance First won’t strike a chord with everyone, but it's also not intended for mainstream appeal, and those who connect with it will do so deeply.

A paternoster of strong scenes and strong performances serve only to highlight pedestrian writing elsewhere.

It frequently seems that what the movie ultimately wants from Samuel Beckett is for him not to have been…well, Samuel Beckett.

Dance First isn’t exactly bad. It’s just too narrow in focus, too incomplete, a biopic that leaves us “waiting” for an elusive, mythic “author” to truly make his entrance.

Rather than grappling with the mind and soul of the man who birthed bizarre, fatalistically funny and existentially unsettling works like Waiting for Godot, James Marsh’s film seems content to merely adapt the “Personal Life” section of Samuel Beckett’s Wikipedia page.

A lot gets packed in here, none of it good.