
Critic Reviews
46
Metascore
Mixed or Average
positive
2(20%)
mixed
6(60%)
negative
2(20%)
Showing 10 Critic Reviews
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Metascore
Metascore
Aug 9, 2024
70
The emotional acuity of a writer who felt things too deeply to stoop to cheap sentiment comes through.
Aug 6, 2024
67
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.
Nov 3, 2023
60
A paternoster of strong scenes and strong performances serve only to highlight pedestrian writing elsewhere.
Aug 15, 2024
60
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.
Jul 30, 2024
50
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.
Aug 9, 2024
50
It frequently seems that what the movie ultimately wants from Samuel Beckett is for him not to have been…well, Samuel Beckett.
Aug 15, 2024
50
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.
Aug 8, 2024
40
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.
Aug 4, 2024
38
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.