The plot has issues. The characters have issues. The filming of dance itself has issues. “Then there are the voice-overs, each more overwrought than the next. ‘There’s a wicked paradox in ballet,’ one intones. ‘Great flexibility is expected to blossom in a rigid world. The brutal rules and endless isolation, the messing of your mind, it somehow contorts your natural tendency to stretch into a perverse expression of a miracle.'” – The New York Times