Critic Reviews

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

Working from a script by Neil Forsythe, Marsh has created a superficially experimental if tame take on an artist of grim truths and dark comedy.

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

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.

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.

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

Parts of the film (which can be seen in select theaters and via video on demand) are so good that it’s a shame it strikes so many false notes.

The movie, written by Neil Forsyth, was surely intended as a tribute, but it plays more like an effort to reduce Beckett to easily comprehensible terms — the sort of terms he most likely would have resisted.

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.