ITtakes a whole load of new tricks for an outsider to march into a tough school these days and inspire nohoper pupils. They've seen Sydney Poitier in To Sir With Love and Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds.

They know all the moves. Or so they think.

Director Liz Friedlander injects a whole new set of moves into this predictable and oh so inspirational tale . . . the students in this tale of ghetto disillusionment learn ballroom dancing from a man who looks like he was beamed in from the 19th century.

It is based on Pierre Dulaine (Antonio Banderas), a real-life instructor who brought ballroom dancing to the toughest schools in New York. He volunteers his services to a Bronx school where his refined manners and policy of opening doors for women makes him ?look like a punk ass". Undeterred, he insists Principal Augustine James (Alfre Woodard) gives him a tough assignment, and she does . . . a class of unruly students permanently on detention. They are kept in a basement . . . a roomful of misfits the kind Banderas would have shot his way out of had it been earlier in his career. Instead, he teaches them the foxtrot and waxes on with a lot of inspirational dance-as-life-philosophy hokum. Screenwriter Dianne Houston follows a set of manoeuvres as formulaic as the Viennese waltz.

Banderas, though, glides through and even passes for charming.

American Dreamz

(Paul Weitz) Hugh Grant, Mandy Moore, Dennis Quaid, Sam Golzari, Willem Dafoe Running time: 107 minutes .WILL the real Paul Weitz please stand up? The director who made American Pie and graduated on to the slightly more sophisticated comedy of About A Boy is nowhere to be seen.

His latest project, American Dreamz, is a ridiculous send-up of American Idol and its make-a-celebrity culture.

It also takes a poke at President Bush . . . with a stick shaped like a left-handed paddle.

Randy Quaid plays an idiot president who has the same salt and pepper hair as President Bush. ?Did you know there are three types of Iraqastanis?" he asks his chief of staff Wally (Willem Dafoe).

Wally steers him clear of foreign policy and installs him as a judge on American Dreamz, a programme whose contestants include a secret alQaeda operative who loves show tunes.

The show's presenter is Hugh Grant. He has the same trendy haircut as he did in About A Boy, and his character is entirely the same too, without any of the redeeming qualities that made him previously so winning.

The farce becomes deadly ironic, an unintended study in anti-humour. It is the sort of frightful whangdoodle that will surely make it a contender for most awful film of the year.