Now Playing
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

sort by name

sort by score

38 12 Rounds
48 17 Again
76 Adventureland
48 Angels & Demons
54 Battle for Terra
xx Bruno
80 Coraline
40 Dance Flick
83 Drag Me to Hell
72 Earth
45 Fast & Furious
61 Fighting
34 Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
72 Gran Torino
73 Hangover, The
47 Hannah Montana: The Movie
51 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
54 Imagine That
41 Knowing
32 Land of the Lost
56 Monsters vs. Aliens
34 My Life in Ruins
51 My Sister's Keeper
46 Next Day Air
42 Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
54 Observe and Report
25 Obsessed
48 Proposal, The
70 Public Enemies
61 Soloist, The
83 Star Trek
64 State of Play
55 Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, The
52 Terminator Salvation
35 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
77 Under the Sea 3D
88 Up
43 X-Men Origins: Wolverine
34 Year One

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

sort by name

sort by score

67 $9.99
75 24 City
66 Adoration
74 Afghan Star
48 Alien Trespass
56 American Violet
82 Anvil! The Story of Anvil
57 Away We Go
81 Beaches of Agnes, The
62 Big Man Japan
28 Big Shot-Caller, The
78 Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
55 Brothers Bloom, The
82 Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
xx Call of the Wild
63 Cheri
62 Cherry Blossoms
63 Dead Snow
65 Departures
18 Downloading Nancy
58 Easy Virtue
70 End of the Line, The
77 Every Little Step
64 Examined Life
80 Food, Inc.
38 Gigantic
56 Girl from Monaco, The
67 Girlfriend Experience, The
87 Gomorrah
89 Goodbye Solo
63 Great Buck Howard, The
79 Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
xx Home
82 Hunger
91 Hurt Locker, The
16 I Hate Valentine's Day
81 Il Divo
54 Is Anybody There?
71 Jerichow
58 Julia
74 Lemon Tree
36 Life is Hot in Cracktown
40 Limits of Control, The
42 Little Ashes
64 Lymelife
50 Management
57 Merry Gentleman, The
66 Moon
35 New York
62 Not Forgotten
xx Offshore
78 O'Horten
64 Outrage
40 Paris 36
54 Pontypool
71 Pressure Cooker
52 Quiet Chaos
83 Revanche
67 Rudo y Cursi
86 Seraphine
65 Sex Positive
70 Shall We Kiss?
77 Sin Nombre
59 Sleep Dealer
74 Song of Sparrows, The
54 Stoning of Soraya M., The
82 Sugar
84 Summer Hours
61 Sunshine Cleaning
28 Surveillance
42 Tennessee
63 Tetro
64 Throw Down Your Heart
80 Tokyo Sonata
63 Tokyo!
70 Tony Manero
74 Treeless Mountain
88 Tulpan
74 Two Lovers
83 Tyson
83 U2 3D
60 Under Our Skin
69 Unmistaken Child
69 Valentino: The Last Emperor
22 What Goes Up
45 Whatever Works
57 Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Dancer Upstairs, The
Fox Searchlight Pictures


6.7

based on 40 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 8 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for strong violence, and for language

Starring Javier Bardem, Laura Morante, Juan Diego Botto, Elvira Mínguez, Alexandra Lencastre, Oliver Cotton, Luis Miguel Cintra, and Javier Manrique

As a Latin American nation nears collapse under a highly organized terrorist movement, idealistic policeman Agustin Rejas (Bardem) faces the greatest challenge of his career: to catch the mysterious guerilla leader Ezequiel. (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

GENRE(S):	Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Nicholas Shakespeare (also novel)
DIRECTED BY:	John Malkovich
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: September 23, 2003 Video: September 23, 2003 Theatrical: May 2, 2003
RUNNING TIME:	124 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	Spain / USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

Time Richard Schickel

Patient and plodding -- but as realized by John Malkovich, in his directorial debut, utterly absorbing.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A story of obsession and honor, deception and self-deception set against a sharply etched landscape of political upheaval and intrigue. Malkovich orchestrates all this with assuredness, and Bardem, looking weary and worn, inhabits his character with a realness, a truth, that's downright spooky. And beautiful.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The movie has a mystery, and moral unease, that lingers.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

The movie does an admirable job of juggling political, dramatic and comic elements.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Echoes its director's own deportment as a performer, alternating silky smoothness with burlap coarseness. Though Mr. Malkovich stays entirely behind the scenes, he creates a languorous but gripping story of people fighting to stay a step ahead of hopelessness.

Variety David Rooney

The film is powered by a superbly controlled performance from Javier Bardem. While it lacks economy and could have used a firmer hand in shaping the key central relationship, this intelligent, arrestingly sober drama packs a cumulative punch.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

If the screenwriter and director had followed their cinematic instincts fully, they would have collaborated on one of the more satisfying political thrillers in years; instead, they've managed to create three-quarters of one.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

The Dancer Upstairs, is a haunting and often beautiful work, part doomed romance and part political thriller, that demonstrates the adult command of the medium Malkovich has always demonstrated as an actor.

Slate David Edelstein

The film has a foggy cast to it--flat and insinuatingly creepy, like the actor. But then it can be lit, in an instant, by searing flash-pots of cruelty and wit. Even when it's slightly opaque, it's transfixing.

USA Today Mike Clark

It has an elusive, haunting quality, but it's too long at 133 minutes, and there aren't many movies these days that get more involving as they progress.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Elegantly, even languorously, photographed by Jose Luis Alcaine, who doesn't punch into things but regards them, so that we are invited to think about them. That doesn't mean the movie is slow; it moves with a compelling intensity toward its conclusion.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Bardem delivers the kind of performance the director might have given himself: subdued, thoughtful, wry, sometimes a bit too detached.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

Malkovich is more interested in hitting notes of elegiac lyricism than delivering socko action; this is a thriller that means to get under your skin rather than make you leap from your seat.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Malkovich weaves something delicate and devastating.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

This is a thriller that embraces stillness and silence where others prefer noise and bombast. It thrives on the hush before the explosion instead of its aftermath, and it's that eerie sense of expectation that gives the film its thick aura of suspense.

The New Yorker David Denby

A dramatic failure, but, at its best, it offers a frightening suggestion of the way terror can alter reality so thoroughly that, step by step, the fantastic becomes accepted as the mere commonplace. [5 May 2003, p. 104]

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Initially engrossing, The Dancer Upstairs slackens in its second half.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

The Dancer Upstairs would have made a suitable double feature with "The Quiet American"; both films unfold slowly, build toward an anxious climax and end with a shrug of grief.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

At its best in the interludes between explosions.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It's not a great film, but in its reckless audacity -- an American director working from a British novel set in Latin America, dealing with the largest themes of Latin American art, politics and history -- it's reassuring. Someone's still willing to take a big chance.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

A labor of love hobbled by a stubborn desire to eke its delicate love story out of a premise that all but sits up and begs to be treated as a political thriller.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Studded with terrorist attacks... Yet Malkovich never exploits these for action-movie thrills: in each instance the loss of life is terrible and the morality of the act is left treacherously ambiguous.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Ambitious and uneven.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Ambitious material for a first-time directorial outing, but, even with a huge assist from his lead actor, Malkovich doesn't nail it.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Far from perfect but completely unique, the film could best be described as a paranoid South American metaphysical political thriller -- you heard me -- and whatever its failures, they're not ones of nerve or imagination.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

A promising film rather than a fully realized one.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The movie is often both smart and creepy, but it's still a novice effort. After an initially engrossing start, it stumbles through a series of implausible coincidences and murky events, barely held together by the magnetic performance of Javier Bardem.

New York Post Megan Lehmann

It's mostly a political thriller, contingent on a love story. It's kind of noirish, subtly humorous and intermittently confusing.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Though he never quite rescues the film, Bardem continually suggests the tensions bubbling under the surface that Dancer itself never penetrates.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It's in English, but the actors speak it with tortuous accents that are a constant struggle to understand and make them seem like foreigners in their own land. Spanish with English subtitles would have served this story much, much better.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The movie fails at the primary steps of turning Rejas' mind inside out and dramatizing the contradictions in his heart and soul.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Casting a film set in Latin America with Spanish-and Italian-speaking performers acting in English misfires; the actors' diverse accents clash, some are clearly more fluent than others and the sense of relief when anyone speaks a rare line in Spanish is palpable.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

The only reason this dilemma has any import is thanks to Bardem, who almost single-handedly drags the film along.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Has many of the qualities that made the actor such a great target for self-parody in Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" - it's sober, deliberate, self-consciously mysterious and no fun at all.

Film Threat Anthony Miele

Humorous yet subtle characters aid Malkovich in creating a film that is engaging and entertaining, while at the same time lumbering during long stretches.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

While you can't fault The Dancer Upstairs for lack of ambition, its tantalizing ingredients add up to a less impressive package than I'd hoped for. Malkovich should select a more manageable subject the next time he sits in the director's chair.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

An ambitious political thriller, a multilingual film of mood and texture and the occasional haunting image.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

A murky, turgid work that is no doubt exactly the film Malkovich wished to make but is so indirect and affected as to border on incoherent.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Malkovich has done considerable directing in the theater, but nothing in the acting here shows acuteness of choice or subtlety of touch.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Falters in small but important ways -– the suspense, carefully ratcheted up throughout, just plain goes busto in the film’s final moments -– while Malkovich stays resolutely behind the camera, a consummate professional who, this time, misses his mark by the merest of degrees.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.7 (out of 10) based on 8 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Joan E. gave it an 8:
This film is a work of art, sometimes gruesome, but definitely artful.

Frank B. gave it a 10:
Wonderful mixture of surrealism and realism. Bardem is great in the lead. Great pacing, excellent cinematography, aborbing editing, and a breath-taking display of honesty and lyricism by the director and editor.

Greg T. gave it a 1:
Watched this movie for 25 minutes and took it off the vcr. Too dreary. The English in it sucked. I kept saying "What did they say?". My movie partner kept answering "Who knows?". This may be a film that turned John Malkovitch's crank, it didn't turn mine.

Jack R. gave it a 6:
The film is too long, too convoluted and with too many coincidences. But it is beautiful to watch, and Bardem is one sexy guy and a superb actor. It is also great to hear the late, lamented Sandy Denny's haunting song, Who Knows Where The Times Goes, sung by the great, late Nina Simone.

Carlos A<./B> gave it a 9:
Deftly reminded me of a place my family escaped some twenty years ago (El Sal). I was transfixed by Javier Bardem's nuanced stares--all the melancholy of Robert Downey Jr with half the baggage and twice the elan. This movie unsettled me, and yet I didn't want it to end. I recommend it to any thinking moviegoer with a disdain for Latin American stereotypical 'magical realism'. This is a movie that would cast Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a numbskull bureacrat to further its ideological rift. Don't worry about the plot. Go Malcatraz.

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page

Dancer Upstairs, The Fox Searchlight Pictures

Dancer Upstairs, The
Fox Searchlight Pictures