If Shall We Dance? is as simplified as one of those color-coded mats that show you exactly where to plant your feet in a proper fox trot, it is also sweetly entertaining and sincere.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2024

A treasure of humor and heartbreak that transcends cultural boundaries. While its sentimental rhythms sometimes move too close to the cloying, it still manages to lift our hearts and set our toes to tapping.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 10, 2024

What's more rousing here is the notion of a life awakened -- the rewarding sight of a mediocre man blossoming and becoming confident.

| Original Score: B | Sep 10, 2024

The lesson has to do with resolving the lure of a dream and coming to an acceptance of real life.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 10, 2024

This charming comedy uses dance as a metaphor for individual expression, risk-taking and intellectual flight.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2024

Shohei's search for inner peace is a roller-coaster ride -- and modest, fancy-effects-free quest that finds you laughing out loud one minute and shedding silent tears the next.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 10, 2024

The movie works on several levels, so if viewers don't understand the social commentary, there's still an amusing story with intriguing characters.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 10, 2024

By letting us laugh at these awkward adults, Suo brings us insights into his world -- and our own.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 10, 2024

There's a certain sadness to the film, and it's matched by an ample dullness.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 10, 2024

Shall We Dance? isn't a film about taking a prize; it's a film about taking a step.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 10, 2024

Shall We Dance? proves to be that most impressive but illusive of accomplishments in film: a simple story told well.

| Sep 10, 2024

This disarming and delightful tale prescribes rumba replacement therapy for male menopause and has a tonic effect on the audience, too.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 10, 2024

Shall We Dance? combines the best elements of old-fashioned "gotta dance" romance with the courage it takes to overcome strict behavioral boundaries, both self-imposed and societal.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 10, 2024

It's funny, self-deprecating and, for all of its two hours, totally absorbing.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 10, 2024

[Not] quite art, and it doesn’t qualify as mass entertainment either. But it’s alert to its characters’ constantly evolving desires in ways that high- and low-culture movies, with their strict aesthetics or their mass-market formulas, tend not to be.

| Aug 21, 2024

Its paper-thin characters turned into caricatures by egregious hamming, this 1996 Japanese comedy drama about shy ballroom dancers is sentimental goo and downright interminable.

| Aug 21, 2024

The picture can be enjoyed simply as a droll tale of conventional types indulging in a mild form of rebellion, but offers more than that.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 21, 2024

The movie has a great deal of zest and charm, and Yakusho gets so exactly that crest of melancholy that is a man’s early 40s, until he decides to go for another kind of life, that the movie is infinitely touching.

| Aug 21, 2024

Funny and poignant, this is entertainment in it's kindest and swishiest form.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2024

The film successfully walks the thin line between slick commercialism and "serious" realism. It is sentimental, but it comes by its sentiment honestly.

| Aug 21, 2024