Movies

A number of energetic dance routines elevate “Feel the Beat,” a predictable dramedy streaming on Netflix. The film hews to the formula of “The Bad News Bears,” following a self-absorbed Broadway achiever named April (Sofia Carson) who becomes an instructor for a preteen dance troupe. Her heart has been hardened in blind ambition, but it’s nothing a few gawky kids in leotards can’t revive.In the film’s opening moments, April botches a Broadway audition by way of an embarrassing public mishap. Her cap brim pulled down in shame, she grudgingly decamps to her Wisconsin hometown where she accepts a job teaching at her old ballet studio. She hopes that an upcoming youth dance competition — in which the instructor shares the spotlight — will resuscitate her career, but her prickly tough love approach leaves the pigtailed girls petrified.[embedded content]The harmony among the kids, particularly the older girls Kari (Lidya Jewett) and Sarah (Eva Hauge), is the film’s greatest asset, and the director, Elissa Down, uses their natural charm as a crutch for the run-of-the-mill story. In an authentic touch, one of the dancers is deaf, and the group often uses sign language to communicate. The kids’ enthusiasm as an ensemble suggests a funnier, warmer movie, a cute clone of “School of Rock” in which the misfits take center stage as they blossom into talented ballerinas. Their joy is enough to thaw April’s iciness, but it can’t save the slight movie that surrounds them.Feel the BeatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

Early on in the plain-spoken documentary “Disclosure” (streaming on Netflix), an interview subject, the actress Jen Richards, makes an acknowledgment and a recommendation. Every transgender person carries their own private record of what they saw in their youth that shaped their understanding of what it meant to be transgender. But to truly recognize one’s place in the cultural landscape, she says, it’s necessary to learn about the broader history of transgender representation onscreen.Combining archival footage with interviews with transgender writers, performers and filmmakers, “Disclosure” sets out to provide a transgender lens on film history. The director Sam Feder draws a significant amount of material from Richards, Laverne Cox, Leo Sheng and others, who generously share memories of encountering transgender stories before their own successes. The documentary relies heavily on these talking heads to give older film and TV reels their context, but the passion and knowledge of the speakers lend force to this familiar — even generic — format.The archival images in “Disclosure” range from D.W. Griffith films to Jerry Springer TV episodes, and they are remarkably consistent. Again and again, we are shown transgender people being bluntly ridiculed and subjected to violence, their autonomy denied and viciously questioned. The way the clips are deployed here recalls the montage ending of Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled,” which showcased a similarly damning set of images of the casual use of blackface in cinema.In both films, it is the sheer abundance of banal, thoughtless cruelty that jolts, and “Disclosure” is careful to note how cruelty multiplies when transgender people are also black. With each successive trip to the grim vaults, the hard-won dignity of the film’s transgender speakers is brought into sharper and sharper relief.DisclosureNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More