Metacritic reviews

Smart and funny, touching and unabashedly sensual... the sweet sleeper of a hot season. [21 Aug 1987]

Dirty Dancing is "Flashdance" with a triple-digit IQ.

Above all, you've got Jennifer Grey, as a rich girl summering in the Catskills and falling for her working-class dance instructor, played by Patrick Swayze. The chemistry between them is red-hot, and they're wonderful dancers.

Flirts throughout with cliches, and some of the more melodramatic plot devices creak at the joints. Still, the potency of this pop romantic can't be denied. [24 Aug 1987]

A shapely film, considered and concise. And if its rhetorical slickness eventually covers up its emotional core, that slickness has a pleasure all its own. [21 August 1987]

A poignant and racy movie. The dancing is pretty great, too.

The script is full of off-the-wall lines that take you by surprise but are perfect. [21 Aug 1987]

If the ending of Eleanor Bergstein's script is too neat and inspirational, the rough energy of the film's song and dance does carry one along, past the whispered doubts of better judgment. [14 Sept 1987]

Before the movie collapses into the utopian nonsense that seems obligatory to this subgenre, a surprising amount of sensitivity and satirical insight emerges from Eleanor Bergstein's script and Emile Ardolino's direction.

Details of the 1963 period are weakly handled, though, and the ending is as false as it is sentimental. [21 Aug 1987]