Musical Chairs

Musical Chairs is about overcoming impossible odds and never giving up and chasing your dreams – all that afterschool-special stuff - but it's also charming and upbeat, and it's stuffed with great, vibrant, insanely catchy music. No Bee Gees, though.

Lightweight but likeably uncynical.

Though there's plenty of movement and enthusiasm, director Susan Seidelman is content with a metronomic approach to manipulating our feelings - buoyant Latin music never felt so routinely scene-setting - and seems afraid to let anyone on-screen depart from established caricature.

The story never quite gets into the groove.

Musical Chairs wants to speak eloquently and powerfully for the disabled. Instead it speaks down to them in the vernacular of bad television comedies, cheeseball underdog dance movies, and abysmal soap operas.

In truth, Musical Chairs is so simplistic it almost feels like a first film.

All would be forgiven if Seidelman weren't so damningly dispassionate about dance, cutting up and away from movement and devaluing the thing we'd countenance so much cheese in order to see.