Angela Tucker

(On Cable TV, September 2022) As hard as I was on a few instalments of the Step-Up series, I do miss them—they were the closest the first two decades of twenty-first century Hollywood had to offer as updates to the musicals of the 1950s. I miss the sense of fun of the dancing and the silliness of the plotting, the combination of modern filmmaking techniques with plain old dance moves. This may serve to explain why I’m somewhat partial to All Styles, even though it’s not much of a movie. This little-seen, low budget, somewhat unambitious film may be far from the best-of-breed, but it still has this spark of interest that makes musicals so much fun. The story is nothing special—a young man trying to put together a crew for a dance competition, little elaboration required. But even if writer-director Angela Tucker is limited by a small budget and the lack of technical polish she would have working for a Hollywood studio, she gets the crucial parts right—the dialogue, the cinematography and, most of all, the dance sequences. All Styles is not, and I’ll highlight this a few times, all that good. Nor is it any original. But it’s more entertaining than you’d think and some of the dance numbers get popping: That’s almost all I ask of a dance film these days.