Metacritic reviews

Musical 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.

In many ways, this effervescent drama from Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) upends conventions, even when it sticks to a familiar narrative path.

Lightweight but likeably uncynical.

The schmaltzy and benign tale of a ballroom dancer who accepts and transcends her unexpected disability through the power of art and love.

The story never quite gets into the groove.

Musical 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.

All 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.

This 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.

In truth, Musical Chairs is so simplistic it almost feels like a first film.

This mawkish rom-com mines class, ethnic and ambulatory boundaries for cheap laughs and cheap-looking visuals.