8 and older
First Position (Unrated). Teens and tweens who love dance and/or are athletes could be transfixed by this fast-moving documentary. It follows several teen and preteen dancers from vastly different backgrounds who enter the Youth America Grand Prix; at stake are full scholarships and potential careers. Twelve-year-old Miko is a talented and determined competitor. Her younger brother, Jules, is less enthusiastic. Joan Sebastian Zamora, a teen from Colombia, has true lead-dancer quality. His family encouraged his dancing to keep him off the streets. Aran Bell, 11, is a hugely talented young dancer with stunning discipline and love for his art. Michaela DePrince is 14. She is from Sierra Leone and was adopted by a New Jersey family. She’s determined to show the dance world that a woman of color can do classical ballet as well as anyone.
THE BOTTOM LINE: The young dancers’ overworked feet are often bloody and have bumps and bunions normally seen on older people. Some sustain injuries that take them out of competition. They are shown doing painful, even dangerous-looking stretches to increase flexibility. One mother might trouble moviegoers with the way she pushes her two kids to dance and underfeeds them to keep them thin.
PG-13
Dark Shadows. Although there’s not much here that’s inappropriate for them, high-schoolers might lose interest in this slow-moving vampire comedy well before it’s over. The film’s sexual content might be a little too much for middle-schoolers. When the very funny Johnny Depp is on camera as gentleman vampire Barnabas Collins, awakened in the year 1972 after 200 years in a coffin, the film is fun — at first. He is droll, though, in his long nails and and cutaway coat, shocked at all things modern and apologizing before drinking people’s blood and killing them. Barnabus returns to his family’s mansion in Maine. He’s determined to help his descendants restore the family business and stop their arch rival, who turned him into a vampire.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Most of the mayhem in “Dark Shadows” is not especially gross or graphic, although Barnabas Collins drinks the blood of several human victims and tosses others around, implicitly killing them. The finale grows more violent, with one character morphing into a werewolf and another cracking and disintegrating before our eyes. The sexual innuendo gets R-ish in one scene with Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, implying oral sex, but it’s not explicit.
Last Call at the Oasis. Some teens are already versed in conservation issues, but the fact that water is a finite resource is not as widely known in this country. “Last Call at the Oasis” is not so much a documentary as advocacy journalism. It looks at water scarcity issues around the world but focuses on the United States, arguing that Americans know far too little about water and use far too much of it. Southern California’s dwindling supply, agriculture’s problematic use of irrigation in arid climates and industrial waste seeping into rural drinking water are all explored, with environmental activist Erin Brockovich featured in the latter issue. Water conservation, it turns out, is a hugely thorny issue. Some teens could find careers in it.
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