Shake Your Bon-Bon

Chock-full of feisty-frank go-girl sextalk speculating on white guys' underplayable size (a myth vanquished by Scott Bakula's unsheathed—though unseen—épée), Luminarias can give the impression of Latino drag queens ad-libbing between lip-synch numbers. Four Latina professionals have interclass and interracial romantic skirmishes (including a Jewish lawyer and a Salvadoran waiter), eventually becoming worldly wise. It looks better than it should considering the microbudget, though the flying camera is bouncing around an L.A. checklist of clunky issues. Still, in some moments—as when Andrea (writer Evelina Fernández) and Joseph (Bakula) reprise the old "jew"/"you" pronunciation gag (also a staple of Charo's banter with Jerry Lewis on his telethon)—Luminarias can produce conversations somewhat more lifelike than the Lifetime channel.

Working-class lives get the steel-and-leather treatment in Bootmen. The hardheaded creators of Tap Dogs trade rinky-dink tapping for a more martial clomp (or Stomp), ditching loafers for work boots. Lead dancer Sean (Adam Garcia, crossing tufts of Rupert Graves with Tom Cruise-oid showboating) is fired from a trad tap show in Sydney and returns to Newcastle to knit his own Full Monty troupe of reluctant working stiffs. The Big Show, which could be a great Dickies ad, is affably clunky, its music a Vegas take on early-'90s grunge. The best sequences—auditions in a strip bar and a public bathroom—still can't compete with that industrial musical called Pola X.