***/****
starring Levan Gelbakhiani, Bachi Valishvili, Ana Javakhishvili, Kakha Gogidze
written and directed by Levan Akin

by Walter Chaw I don’t know that Levan Akin’s beautifully-shot, sensitively-performed And Then We Danced does anything especially novel, but it lands everything it attempts. That’s an apt metaphor, I think, for a film about an elite Georgian dance troupe that ends with an audition where our hero, Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), Curt Schilling-bloody-socks his way through a gutsy routine. It plays out a lot like the audition in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria reboot in all its physicality and injury fear/revulsion, just as the rest of it plays out like Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name in the broad strokes of its gay coming-of-age melodrama. And Then We Danced is derivative, sure, but at least it’s derivative of the right films.