(Photo by Courtesy Everett Collection)

30 Essential Dance Movies

As seminal dance film Save the Last Dance turns 20, we look at the best dance films ever made… and why the Julia Stiles favorite is just a bit too off-beat to make the cut.

Save the Last Dance, which turns 20 this year, has some things you probably want in a movie. A soundtrack that includes Jill Scott and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes? Yes. References to James Baldwin in the first twelve minutes? You got it. A 23-year-old Kerry Washington in one of her first adult roles, radiating the kind of charisma and power that will one day convince Pope Associates to kill and die for her? Damn right.

It also has a lot of what you’d expect to find in a dance movie, especially one about a ballet dancer. Rehearsal montages? Absolutely. Bleeding toes mangled by hours spent dancing in pointe shoes? Obviously. A dramatic final number performed in front of snooty gatekeepers? Of course.

Unfortunately, for lovers of dance, Save the Last Dance’s dance sequences themselves leave a lot to be desired: the hip hop club scenes are given short shrift, as are the moments in which the lead characters go to the Joffrey Ballet to watch a professional performance. The sequences in which Julia Stiles and her body double do ballet – and especially when they perform the climactic ballet-hip hop hybrid final number – are a reminder that while it can be hard to cast actors who can really dance (or dancers who can really act), it’s usually worth it.

As for the racial politics of the movie – suburban white girl moves to Chicago to live with her father when her mother dies, goes to a majority Black high school where students have criminal records and kids, falls for the college-bound Black boy who teaches her hip hop, and is relieved of the comforting colorblind fantasy that there’s “only one world” – it’s not so much that they’ve aged badly. In a crop of dance movies that came out between 2000 and 2006 (Center Stage, Step Up, etc.), Save the Last Dance is the most direct about race and racism, making explicit what a lot of the other movies leave implicit. But it’s hard to imagine a dance movie made in 2020 putting a gawky white ballet dancer learning hip hop – and her realization that white women enjoy privilege that plays out in their dating and social lives – at the center of its narrative. Which is a sign of how the needle has moved in the two decades since Save the Last Dance was released.

And there are still some things that the film leaves implicit, the most obvious of which is the notion that ballet is inherently white and feminine, practiced by uptight and feminine people, that it’s a form of rigid artifice. Hip hop, on the other hand, a Black artform with origins in street and social dancing, is depicted as inherently loose, cool, masculine, and real. These are stereotypes that were in place in 2001 – and that have been reinforced by films in which uptight white girls have to learn to loosen up and get down – and they persist today, making ballet and Blackness seem antithetical, especially for Black girls and women who aspire to learn ballet.

In honor of Save the Last Dance’s 20th anniversary, we’ve assembled a list of 30 essential dance movies sorted by Tomatometer, encompassing ballet, hip hop, modern, tap, ballroom, breaking, and the magic of Mike.

In order to be considered for this list, the movie had to include diegetic dancing – that is, dancing that the characters acknowledge as dancing, as opposed to a musical number in which the characters break out in song and dance. Exceptions were made for musicals that contained diegetic numbers, like A Chorus Line, which is about a Broadway audition, and Singin’ in the Rain, which is about the creation of a musical. -Chloe Angyal

 Angyal is a contributing editor at MarieClaire.com and the author of Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet From Itself, which will be published by Bold Type Books on May 4. 

(Photo by Universal / Everett Collection)

The 40 Lowest-Rated Best Picture Nominees Of All Time

A Certified Fresh movie winning the Best Picture Oscar? That’s expected. The last time that didn’t happen was in 1995 when the “just” Fresh Forrest Gump took home the big gold. And you’d have to go back to 1985 for the last Rotten winner of Best Picture: Out of Africa, the creaky and nearly three-hour romantic epic starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.

Out of Africa may not be looked back upon with much fondness among critics, but the movie’s got plenty of company in our guide of the 40 Lowest-Rated Best Picture Nominees. Across 92 Academy Awards ceremonies, we’ve collected every Best Picture nominee with less than 70% on the Tomatometer. From recent times, this includes popular favorites that may have divided critics but hit big-time with audiences, like Joker and Bohemian Rhapsody – both Fresh at 68% and 60% respectively, and both with astronomical Audience Scores – and already almost-forgotten curiosities such Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the most recent Rotten film to be nominated for Best Picture. (If you want to see only the winners, check out All 92 Best Pictures Ranked.)

Rotten movies to actually take home the Best Picture statue, besides Out of Africa, include Cimarron, The Greatest Show on Earth, and The Broadway Melody. The latter won in the second Academy Awards ceremony, and is part the most Rotten crop of Best Picture nominees ever, with The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and In Old Arizona. This was the year sound film became the new standard in filmmaking, so it’s easy imagining the Academy being dazzled by these on a technical level.

Other famous movies to nearly win despite not being that great – according to the Tomatometer, at least – include The Big Chill, Babel, and The Godfather: Part III. We guess Francis Ford Coppola will just have to take solace in the fact that he’s directed one of only two series where every movie was nominated for Best Picture (the other being Lord of the Rings). See more of the movies that got less than 70% in our guide to the Lowest-Rated Best Picture Nominees! —Alex Vo

(Photo by Ben Gabbe/Getty Images)

Those who’ve not had the chance to see groundbreaking ballerina Misty Copeland dance in person will be treated to the next best thing this month, as the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) principal makes her big-screen non-documentary debut in Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. Copeland, the first African American dancer to be made a principal in the ABT’s almost 80-year history, plays the “ballerina princess” in the film, and is said to dazzle in one of the movie’s centerpiece moments.

Nutcracker feels like an appropriate introduction to Copeland for movie audiences. The ballerina has been performing in Marius Petipa’s The Nutcracker Ballet, which the film adapts, since she began dancing in her early teens. Her first time performing the ballet, she played the young princess Clara, who is played by McKenzie Foy in the new film; Copeland’s been performing the ballet most of her career, most recently last year in an ABT production choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky. Her incredible rise in the world of ballet is charted in the Fresh documentary, A Ballerina’s Tale.  

Ahead of the release of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, Copeland shared with Rotten Tomatoes her favorite films set in the world of dance.

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The Nutcracker and the Four Realms opens in theaters everywhere Friday November 2.