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75Musical Chairs is about overcoming impossible odds and never giving up and chasing your dreams – all that afterschool-special stuff - but it's also charming and upbeat, and it's stuffed with great, vibrant, insanely catchy music. No Bee Gees, though.
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63Musical Chairs is a feel-good romantic fantasy that is likely to inspire a hollow laugh among some people in wheelchairs. Either it knows little about the realities of disability, or it knows too much.
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60Lightweight but likeably uncynical.
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60In many ways, this effervescent drama from Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) upends conventions, even when it sticks to a familiar narrative path.
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50Though there's plenty of movement and enthusiasm, director Susan Seidelman is content with a metronomic approach to manipulating our feelings - buoyant Latin music never felt so routinely scene-setting - and seems afraid to let anyone on-screen depart from established caricature.
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50Settles for being simple, familiar and ineffective, though I suspect it'll warm a few hearts.
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Mar 23, 201250The story never quite gets into the groove.
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50The schmaltzy and benign tale of a ballroom dancer who accepts and transcends her unexpected disability through the power of art and love.
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42Musical Chairs wants to speak eloquently and powerfully for the disabled. Instead it speaks down to them in the vernacular of bad television comedies, cheeseball underdog dance movies, and abysmal soap operas.
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40This mawkish rom-com mines class, ethnic and ambulatory boundaries for cheap laughs and cheap-looking visuals.
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40In truth, Musical Chairs is so simplistic it almost feels like a first film.
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Mar 21, 201240This would-be inspirational picture has its heart in the right place, but with default-setting characters, loudly telegraphed emotional beats and lack of any real sizzle to enliven its maudlin moralizing, it all feels like a cursory run through a well-trodden routine.
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Mar 20, 201240All would be forgiven if Seidelman weren't so damningly dispassionate about dance, cutting up and away from movement and devaluing the thing we'd countenance so much cheese in order to see.