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

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

| Original Score: 3/4 | 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

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

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

[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 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

Even when the catharsis we yearn for arrives, it’s tinged with restraint. But then, the true romance in Shall We Dance? is more than personal. It’s the spectacle of a nation learning to dance with itself.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 7, 2011

While the film's balancing act, between the love interest in fragile beauty Tamiyo Kusakari and the call of the protagonist's domestic ties, is ultimately contrived, unlike Hollywood tosh, it never feels blatantly manipulative.

| Aug 25, 2007

Like the breathtaking number from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The King and I, from which the film takes both its title and inspiration, Shall We Dance? will sweep you off your feet.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Masayuki Suo's direction combines the psychological and intriguing with comedy bits that might be found in a lesser movie.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Shall We Dance? holds forth the sunny possibility that beyond the most timid exterior there may be a tangoing Walter Mitty to be found.

| Jan 1, 2000

This leisurely little import has its moments - but far too many of them. It runs two hours and seems to end five times.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000