Father and child sit together smiling while looking at a smart phone.

Want more recommendations for your family?

Sign up for our weekly newsletter for entertainment inspiration

Parents' Guide to

Dance of the Forty One

By Jennifer Green, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 17+

Mexican period drama about forbidden love is explicit.

Movie NR 2021 99 minutes
Dance of the Forty One Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: Not yet rated
Kids say: Not yet rated

This film from Mexico looks gorgeous and is well acted, but ultimately the style outweighs the substance. Dance of the Forty One aims to convey a message about the consequences of oppression by contrasting the tense, ultimately abusive relationship between Ignacio and Amada with the tender affair between Ignacio and Evaristo. All three actors do a commendable job embodying this tension as well as their characters' simmering frustration with their respectively inhibited love stories. But the production feels much more concerned with depicting Ignacio's clandestine life, reveling in images of the men at the club performing for each other, than in developing its main characters more fully.

As Eva, Emiliano Zurita is particularly underused, and we never really get to know his character. Amada transforms from blushing bride to tortured goat lady to heartless tormentor in record time, and her husband ends a broken man. It's a morality tale dressed in sumptuous period costume and candle-lit rooms (surely there's symbolism in the film's use of light and shadows), but the viewer -- especially outside Mexico, where the historical event is not well-known -- will be left wishing the script had matched the complexity of the production design.

Movie Details

Inclusion information powered by

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

See how we rate