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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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The Dancer Upstairs.
This film is too long and unnecessarily complicated to deliver a simple message. In the process it leaves the viewer tired in losing interest as one tries to make sense in what is being dished out piecemeal. A forgettable film.
Rating: 
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Entertaining, Yet Abridged
I got the feeling while watching this film that a good 30-45 minutes of worthwhile film ended up on the virtual cutting room floor. I never quite bought into the Captain's emotional attachment to the Dance teacher, and thought this was just one area that could have been flushed out a bit more. The film started out with a solid foundation and premise, but then seemed to rock-skip toward the end. I wish I had seen an extended version.
Rating: -
John! get checked for that "Cyrus virus"
OK, so now we know that John M. has some psycho-leanings which he wants to convey to the rest of us through film.
here's the warnings:
1) the dancer doesn't live upstairs,
2) we never really see her dance,
3) the titillating partial-undress picture on the cover never occurs in the movie (hurray for PG-13 hopes for this vid),
4) the explosion scene on the cover is from a thrown-in scene and we don't even know who got blown up in that scene,
5) I guess this is a love story??? the weird thing about this is that hero-man is married and we don't see any marital problems other than the fact that wifey has a bit of a life outside waiting for stone-face to come home now and then,
6) another chick pops in 2x to flirt with our main man, but we don't know who she is, or if these two have ever done the sneaky-deed or what, and there's no follow-up to her character,
7) our main character's acting never gets over 10mph, except for one scene where some non-character soldier is obeying orders and starts to remove pinned-up drawings from our main-character's daughter. ok, touching, but I thought this was a sleek espionage thriller, not a weepy father/daughter slice of life story!
8) a trailer comes up on the bottom of the screen early on and tells us this all happens in "Central America" ... shhhh! don't tell anyone where it REALLY takes place, John! give me a break!
and finally,
9) maybe our Central American neighbors are impressed with a main character who boasts of nothing more than being the tallest guy in the film (at what? 5'11"?), but up here in the big ol' USofA we grow 'em big like that all the time.
10) Why did we have to see a stick of dynamite rammed up a dog's "the end"??? This movie was worse than a turkey. It's a mangy dead-dog movie.
Rating: 
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Slow, beautiful, thinker's movie
Though this movie is slow moving and quiet, it is one of the finest films I've seen in forever. Javier Bardem is amazing. No question. The music is spare but affecting (and one of the most memorable parts of this film). I don't want to give away any of the plot but this is a real thinker's love story (in the midst of a terrorist revolution-in-the-making backdrop), smart, brilliant, surprising in every way without gratuitous sex scenes and cheesy, predictable "happily ever after" endings. Malkovich is a genius. Bardem makes you feel his pain. A must see for any smart film lover. Can't recommend enough.
Rating: 
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The Dancer Upstairs: the wreck of unmotivated violence
Augustin Rejas is a former attorney. Disillusioned, he has decided to join the police force in the hopes that he might obviate the rulings of a corrupt court system. Once he has established himself as an Investigator, he is ordered to assemble a small team and to look into a series of events that may or may not be the makings of united revolutionary activity. There are bombings, suicide bombings, assassinations, brown outs and other unmentionable acts of violence committed throughout this unnamed Latin American country. And the perpetrators are a seemingly random assembly of men, women and children, drawn, with no discernable criteria, from the indigenous poor, their Spanish-descended rulers and the buffering middle classes. The violence may occur at any moment, in any degree and from out of any direction; the tension is unbearable.
Inspector Rejas is a massive still presence. His principle investigative instruments are a fascination for fact, an impassive stare and an unrelenting deliberative nature. And with these, he does eventually determine the identity of the leader of this goalless revolution: a former university professor, known only as Ezekiel. But Ezekiel is an empty revelation: Rejas was never really looking for who but for why.
The Dancer Upstairs is commonly described as a political thriller-a misnomer that may dissuade you from recognizing it as a work of another and higher intellectual order. It is, rather, a meditation on the horror of things inexplicable. We are presented with a puzzling succession of events for which we, like Inspector Rejas, must provide an explicating narrative of some sort. Our motivation is the desire to repair the imbalance, to eliminate the random, violent variables that have wrecked our equation for the peace of meaning. The name "Ezequiel" seems to want to point to something, as do the slogans, the posters and the suicidal dedication of Ezequiel's followers. But they are only so many empty ciphers. And while the revelation is admittedly painful, we should remember that Inspector Rejas--the element of good with whom we will identify--is himself a kind of cipher: inexplicably strong, honest, determined. But he is--if for no ultimately satisfactory reason--a satisfactory counter to the damnable example of Ezequiel.
