Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Phillida Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Noelle The movie is surprisingly subdued in its pacing, its characterizations, and its go-for-broke sensibilities.

connorbbalboa Style-over-substance films usually annoy me. When those movie are as bad as Flashdance, I just want to ask the people who made them what they were thinking. Actually, this was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, who are well known for making films of cinematic gloss, but nothing with real humanity. The story is so simple, the whole thing is probably 50 minutes too long. This is basically Rocky if the story has dance scenes for filler, the numerous subplots went nowhere, and the characters weren't appealing.For a story, Jennifer Beals plays a young girl named Alex who wants to be a professional dancer, and not just to dance at a small nightclub. By day, she works as a welder at a steel mill; shocking since she is only 18. The steel mill boss's son falls in love with her and later tries to help her get into the professional dance group that she yearns to be a part of, if only she had more confidence.Everything that I highlighted in just three sentences is everything there is to know about the main story. Everything else is just music video-inspired dancing scenes (which, unfortunately, are mostly performed by Beals's body double instead of Beals herself) set to popular 80s songs, and subplots that go nowhere or are resolved in five minutes. For one thing, Alex sees the boss's son with his previous wife, she gets mad and throws a rock at his window, but the next day, he explains why his ex-wife was with him in the first place. Later, her friend joins a sleazy strip club, and Alex forces her to leave after three minutes. There is even an old woman who is Alex's friend, and conveniently, was also a famous dancer. Not enough time is spent on the relationship they have and the film never establishes how they met.The acting is average at best, with Beals giving the warmest performance of the whole cast, and most of the characters act like old stereotypes, such as the pathetic friend who makes useless jokes (which leads to another sub-plot that goes nowhere) and the aggressive jocks who have eyes for the main heroine. Alex herself is also the victim of the horrible screenplay. Close to the beginning of the film, she actually does come close to signing up for an audition for the dance group, but she backs out because she is afraid. Not a good enough reason? Well, the film still has an hour and fifteen minutes left, and if she did get her confidence at that moment, it would be nothing more than a short film.I have very little to say about Flashdance because the film offers so little. I guess the dance scenes are well shot, and Beals performance makes things a little more tolerable, but everything else is quite awful. Even some of the 80s songs are poor. This is easily one of the most uninteresting pieces of nothing ever made.

Emma Maguire On a whole, I went into Flashdance as a fan of dance films. I love dance films, I really truly do, but there comes a time where a dance film becomes a music video, and Flashdance has just crossed that thresh hold.Jennifer Beals, playing the lovable and very talented Alex, is one of the only highlights of this film. She is very good at what she does and quite endearing, but her appearance as the main character doesn't make up for the fact that this film is pretty bad in many other ways.The prominent men in Alex's life are creepy, and she falls in love with the one who follows her home in his car, buys her way into an audition, and generally just uses his power as her boss over her. The film itself lacks a majority of a plot, and the exposition needed to explain Alex's existence simply isn't there. Why does she want to dance? How are these people she spends time with related to her? How old is she in relation to her partner? Why should we care about her story? It's bad to come out of a film and realise that you haven't really been impacted by any of the characters' stories.The continuity is messy. There are cuts where there shouldn't be and chronologically, everything is a bit of a disaster.However, the dancing is very good, and the soundtrack is awesome. This film could be worse.

chaos-rampant It takes practice to probe ourselves for insight of how we felt about something, it's not easy. Easier to numb ourselves, watch and forget it afterwards, but in this way we never really know anything. This is also in a roundabout way the point behind musicals, easy to be numbed, takes practice to probe and push yourself to create something that is true.The enemy of the protagonist in the musical or dance film then is compromise, mediocrity. It's the nagging worry that life will never amount to something, it will be drowned in routine—the antidote is dance, love, staging the circumstances that will permit purity of expression. In the musical this usually took the shape of showmen and women fighting to stage a show that sublimates the difficulties, this is also the case here, but with a twist.A final show is promised early on, a dance audition that makes or breaks her future (she thinks), failing which she's going to become just another 9 to 5 person chasing after the next bill. The place is glum Pittsburgh, she works in a factory by day. Around her we see the people who have been numbed by failure, lost their color—the failed comedian, her ice-rink dancer friend who ends up on the floor of a sleazy titty bar after a bad performance.They could have done something here. A bleak urban landscape instead of Broadway, the factory as the place where self is constructed to be only another cog in the machine—and yet in this place, dance, expression, sexuality. Her latenight show (she's an exotic dancer by night) struggling to find purity and truth in the midst of cheap thrills, still exhilarating in spite of how viewers consume it. Can dance become routine? Does it matter how the viewers see it?Their twist was something else. The final show is always postponed and the fight to stage it and dream to be someone are dredged from a pseudo Cassavetes desperation about life instead of using the snappy cadence of the musical. A bit of dance in the beginning and end and the whole middle is an hour of wallowing. The idea must have been, first make the viewer bleed, serve us 'reality' instead of a musical fairytale.But what I see is no less of a fairytale. A materialism about the difficulties but when it comes to the last release, the dance audition, we go back to the snappy, idealized Hollywood dance we expected all along. She triumphs of course. An awestruck committee member claps childishly at how good. The slice- of-life was merely an idealized style, a trope rather than commitment, so that it manages in one swoop to kill both the fun and the honesty. Terrible.

madpigmadpig An 18-year-old female daytime welder and evening stripper (more like cheeseball interpretive dancer) waffles about auditioning for a dance school while idling with her various co-workers.Some of the dancing is good, but most of it is more mechanical than artistic and almost seems to ignore the accompanying music. The camera-work is surprisingly professional though. The editing in this movie is incredibly clunky, jumpy (unintentionally visible and not supportive of telling the story), and the editor keeps repeating the same shots far too close together and too often to be for the purpose of either building momentum or getting a point across. Rather than being a stylistic choice, this seems to be an example of clumsy editing - rookie film student stuff. I lost interest at the 18-minute mark when the writers decided to extend the plot merely by postponing the inciting action of the last act (applying to the school) due to nerves. But I kept watching anyway, so here's the rest: The majority of the film consists of an insipid attempt at a romance story between the protagonist and her wealthy boss. The protagonist is wholly un-compelling. The side characters (an ice skater/stripper and a cook/racist comedian) are uninteresting, mildly offensive, and a general waste of time. The love interest is just a bit creepy, and not just because he's waay too old for her.Recommended for people intent on watching all 80s dance movies, no matter how poorly made they are.Content notes: Lots of filthy cussing and some racist language, some partial nudity, soily perverts acting pervy, one brief fight scene.