Footloose

Twenty years on, Herbert Ross's teen yarn is already a period piece. It's set at that moment in the mid-1980s when musical sequences in studio films began to be filmed like pop promos. The premise wouldn't pass muster in a Cliff Richard movie. Bacon is the clean-cut but rebellious big city boy adrift in a white, Protestant backwater town where (absurdly) rock'n'roll is banned. He's pitted against the neurotic town preacher (Lithgow), whose daughter (Singer) he promptly falls in love with. Ross, who began his career as a dancer and choreographer, brings plenty of gusto to the material and the performances are ebullient, but this is still a cynical and manipulative exercise with little feel for the teen culture it purports to celebrate.