GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

maxdaddytj I remember sitting in a hotel room in Manhattan in June, 1984, and my then-lover had just walked out the door - probably for good. I turned on the radio and the song "Separate Lives" came on. Well. And may I say, NOT for that reason alone did I always feel Stephen Bishop was robbed blind at the Oscarsd the following spring by losing to Lionel Richie's vapid, pointless "Say You, Say Me." BUT back to the movie! Even my mother wanted me to take her when that movie came out. And GOD, what a killer. Much Kleenex. But because it held a depth of emotion that was genuine. Gregory Hines.......................wow. And you know, really, in view of recent world events, the premise which some of us thought rather silly at the time - well, doesn't all that seem more plausible now?

angelofvic Mixed feelings about this one. Rented it in hopes of some good Baryshnikov dancing encased in an interesting plot. I got through only 30 minutes of it and packed it back to Netflix for the following day's mail. I relented the next day and decided I should at least check for any dance sequences. So I did, and fast-forwarded through most of the rest of the film, watching only enough to get me the general plot or good parts.The film stars Mikhail Baryshnikov, with Gregory Hines, Isabella Rossellini, and Helen Mirren. Yes, some big names there, but not put to the best use. The script is leaden and dull, the directing soporific. Hines looks lost as an actor, in his admittedly incongruous part of a black American tap-dancer who has defected to Russia because of racism in the U.S. The movie is about a famous Russian-American dancer (Baryshnikov) who crash-lands in the USSR and is apprehended as a former defector and forced to stay and hopefully dance. Hines and his new Soviet wife (Rossellini) are forced to babysit him and, along with the danseur's Russian ex-flame Mirren, convince him to dance at the upcoming opening night at the Kirov.Most of it was skip-worthy, but there's a great, passionate dance Baryshnikov does to a rousing banned Russian song. There's also a dancing duo between Baryshnikov and Hines which is quite lovely. Apart from a modern-dance snippet at the film's outset, and an 11-pirouette turn by Baryshnikov on a bet, that's all of his dancing. They really should have capitalized on his presence and given us a real showstopper to top off the film, but I guess that didn't fit the plot, such as it was.I wasn't really into Hines' numbers that much. There were a few dramatic scenes I stayed tuned for, and the shots of Leningrad are really great, but plot- and acting-wise this ended up being a tiny bit of a "Yes, Giorgio" (the Pavarotti flop), but not nearly that unwatchable. I did enjoy Baryshnikov whenever he was on screen, whether it was acting or dancing. The man is just magnetic, and very cinematic.As I got more into it, I decided to watch the "Making of" special feature snippets, which were actually better than the plot of the movie itself. Did you know that they couldn't film in Russia with Baryshnikov, because as a defector he was a criminal and feared re-capture and punishment? (They still got plenty of Leningrad exteriors, though.) And that Gregory Hines called him "Mike" for the duration, and Baryshnikov didn't object? (His usual sobriquet is "Misha.") And that Helen Mirren met her husband, director Taylor Hackford, on this set? And that half of Helen Mirren's family is Russian, and her birth name is Helen Mironoff?I'd give it a 6/10. Definitely worth it for Baryshnikov fans, but prepare to use fast forward if you tend to lose patience.

Ed Uyeshima Seeing this 1985 movie (dubbed without irony by director Taylor Hackford as a "political dance thriller" in his DVD commentary) over twenty years later in a pristine new print reminds me exactly what I thought about it back then. That is that Hackford recruited two world-class dancers of completely different genres and then went about and contrived a far-fetched Cold War thriller story around them. It is really the unparalleled dancing that makes this film still watchable beginning with Mikhail Baryshnikov's extraordinary performance of Roland Petit's ballet, "Le jeune homme et la mort", opposite Florence Faure over the opening credits. His artful athleticism inevitably makes the rest of his acting feel rather pedestrian, as he unsurprisingly portrays Nikolai Rodchenko, a world-renowned Russian ballet dancer who has defected to the US after having been the leading performer of the Kirov Ballet.Written by James Goldman, the plot has his character on a Tokyo-bound airliner that's forced to land in Siberia where KGB authorities want to detain him in order to have him stay permanently in his homeland. To help matters along, Colonel Chaiko, the chief Soviet intelligence officer, decides to have Rodchenko live with Raymond Greenwood, a black American who has defected to the Soviet Union because the pervasive racism has not allowed his own artistic freedom. Gregory Hines acquits himself admirably with this impossible role, but more importantly, it simply provides him an excuse to dazzle with his own "tap improvography" (the actual verbiage used in the end credits) in a couple of spectacular tap numbers. The two masters even get to duet twice, and instead of looking incompatible, they are quite stunning as they mesh their divergent styles fluidly.The rest of the overly long story feels like an old episode of the 1960's TV series, "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." where Chaiko plots to convince Rodchenko to stay by reinstating him at the Kirov, which is now under the management of his abandoned lover, Gailna Ivanova. Trust issues arise between the former lovers, and yet another complicating element to his escape is Greenwood's Russian wife Darya who has not fully reconciled with her husband's U.S.-bred values and stays fearful at the possibility of leaving the Soviet Union. The events in the last quarter of the film consist of standard-issue spy thriller clichés and it all ends in a quite unbelievable manner.Polish film director Jerzy Skomilowsky portrays Chaiko in an all-too-familiar dastardly manner. Playing Russian women, Isabella Rossellini (in her American film debut) and especially Helen Mirren are convincing, even if their decidedly secondary roles require little more than crying and expressing regrets. At certain moments and I'm sure they are quite intentional, Rossellini emits a glowing innocence similar to her mother Ingrid Bergman in her youth. The estimable Geraldine Page is wasted playing Rodchenko's agitated American manager. The soundtrack brings back nostalgic memories for me, even if the 1980's-style music makes the film feel as dated as the persistently gray images of pre-Gorbachev Russia.The new 2006 DVD includes a relatively insightful commentary track from Hackford and a nice twenty-minute looking-back featurette which includes remembrances from Hackford, Rossellini and Mirren and a brief tribute to Hines who died in 2003. The original theatrical trailer, a piece of 80's kitsch in itself, is also included as well as previews to unrelated dance-oriented films and DVDs.

sorrow87 Well it's a pretty fantastic movie, combining two of the greatest dancers of our time in a bunch of fantastic sequences. And that's the good part.I think the anti-Soviet propaganda is pretty strong with this one, but really, what can you expect from an American director at the height of the Cold War? Still, some of the parts can be a bit much if you're from the generation after.All in all, a good movie. Mikhail the disenchanted expatriate dancer who longs for his former glories, and Gregory Hines the tortured protagonist who simply longs for a better life.