The movie follows Sara Johnson, a 17-year-old high-school student who sets her sights on being a professional ballerina, but she has to put her plans on hold and transfers to an urban Chicago school after her mother's death. There she falls in love with a black teen from the South Side with a rough, semi-criminal past.
Squanders nice performances by Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas by confining them and the supporting cast to cookie-cutter roles and hackneyed inner-city subplots.
TheMovieReport.com
December 06, 2005
Ultimately, this talented twosome [Stiles and Thomas] can only do so much with a script that continually lets them down at about every turn.
As teen melodrama, well, Carter's film is what it is; but for such a mainstream black-consciousness movie, at least it doesn't shy from addressing some touchy issues about masculinity, parenthood, and black attitudes to whites.
