Perfect cast and a good story

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

The Company is, I believe, intended to be a film about dancers, but it winds up being mainly a vehicle for the dancing sequences, which are wonderful. In fact,I find the analogy of a chocolate chip cookie to be the best description-- the dough serves mainly to hold the chocolate chips! Every time I watched this film (I recorded it from a cable channel) I found myself fast-forwarding to the next dance sequence, and wound up making a recording of just the dance sequences so I could watch them without sitting through the material in between! The acting is adequate, but the story line is sparse and one really does not become engaged by the characters. Still, it is worth watching just to see the dancing, and the variety of pieces makes it enjoyable for folks who are not familiar with dance. I especially love the music, particularly the arrangement of My Funny Valentine for the pas de deux in the rain...beautiful!

Ry (Neve Campbell) is a dancer for the Chicago Joffrey Ballet, run by Alberto (Malcolm McDowell). She is a very committed hoofer, even to continuing a performance during a thunderstorm! But, alas, she learns that her boyfriend, also a dancer for the troupe, has been cheating on her. The creep! Life in the company is very difficult, at times, for Albeto is most demanding and folks can be cut from the group on a minute's notice. Injuries, too, can rear their ugly heads. Fortunately, Ry acquires a handsome new boyfriend, a chef (James Franco) and works very hard on the new production, a modern revue which starts with a costumed snake! Will it be successful? If you don't like either dance or Altman, you should probably not keep company with this film. It is a rather difficult watch, almost like a reality show but one where everything is not spelled out. For example, we see Ry at a bridal shower in a local eatery and, in the background, is a chef that will become her new love. But, we never see the two of them meet. The next time we glimpse either of them, they are already a couple. This will please some folks, who like the unusual, and confuse others. The dancing is very modern, so don't expect Swan Lake as well. Most of the dance numbers, very well done, involve an absence of sets at all. They rely on various changes of lighting, mostly, and we see it as on stage and off, where it is blinding. The acting is good but sometimes subordinate to the style of the film. Franco, for one, remains a stranger we would like to know better. That said, if you like ballet and you also adore movies that stand out from the rest, get The Company. Its unique qualities and fabulous numbers make it very worthwhile for discriminating filmgoers.

I was really looking forward to watching this movie, as I always love ballet movies! However, I was a bit disappointed when I got around to seeing it.Don't get me wrong, the dancing's great, but dance performance and film are completely different media. It's hard to base a film on just a series of dance performances, and little plot.One thing I always look forward to in ballet movies is rehearsal and class scenes, with the performance scenes being less important in my eyes, as we the as the audience still can't see the real lives of the dancers without seeing classes and rehearsals. I would have liked to have seen more class and rehearsal sequences, as opposed to a lot of performances. That being said, I do love the feature on the DVD allowing you to play all the dance sequences.The lack of plot is also a factor for me. After watching it a couple of times, I was still a bit confused as to who most of the characters are, and what they do. I had to watch the DVD commentary to find out who most of the characters were.All in all, I don't think this is a great movie. The dance performances are good (my personal favourites being 'Light Rain' and the salsa-type ballet), but that is the only recommendation I'd make for it.

I suppose you can call this splendid movie a documentary showing several months in the life of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. However, as there are some dramatized elements (albeit to a minimum), you can't technically call it a documentary. And yet, it's more truthful than many "full" documentaries. Completely free from contamination of melodrama, the movie shows us, in a matter-of-fact manner, things behind the stage – dedication and sacrifices, lucky breaks that even the top talents sometimes need, experienced performers arguing anainst new ideas, injury and understudy stepping in at a moment's notice, disappointment from being fired, and much more.Doing what he does best, master Altman gives you an inconspicuous spot in the rehearsal hall, in the meeting room, back stage, to show you how an idea evolves right from an artist's concept to a successful performance – the road that is sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating and everything in between, the process that affects the lives of the people who are part of the whole. Overlapping dialogue here is not just Altman's artistic and technical trademark, but the way people REALLY speak. Through his amazing deployment of the camera, he also gives the audience a kaleidoscope of events and emotions that are fleeting and fluid, and yet remain with you long after the movie.In addition to the insight of the documentary, dance lovers will enjoy the generous helping of dance scenes, particularly the outdoor performance in a thunder storm at the beginning. And although personal story is not the point of this movie, the depiction of the relationship between the characters played by Neve Campbell (the dancer) and James Franco (the chef) is wonderful. The scene of their first meeting is a joy to watch – she is playing pool by herself and really enjoying it while he, a drink in hand, regards her somewhat stoically at a distance. The two of them are depicted in so many angles, sometimes in the same frame, sometimes separately. This scene is so mesmerizing that you'll forget the passage of time. At long last, they make eye contact and smile. Then, a cut to the next morning in her apartment when they are just waking up, as he offers to cook breakfast for them. An absolutely beautiful sequence.Campbell and Franco are simply wonderful. The icon of the movie, however, is artistic director of the company Alberto Antonelli , generally known as "Mr A", who comes off larger than life with the flare of Malcolm McDowell, who undoubted is remembered best from "A clockwork orange".To people who have experienced the joy of stage performance, even in a very modest way of an amateur choir or theatre group, there is the bonus of additional empathy – the sometimes not so smooth rehearsals, the panic as the performance approaches and nothing seems to work, the last minute jitters before curtain, the final jubilation when everything miraculously falls into place and the sincere applause of the audience. Such empathy!