Production notes

Julia Stiles landed the role of Sara after director Thomas Carter saw her dance scene in the 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You. Lacking dance experience, Stiles prepared for her role by two months of intensive training for the ballet scenes and also rehearsing the choreography for the hip hop scenes. Fatima Robinson was the film's hip hop choreographer. Lemont High School in Lemont, IL was used as the filming location for Sara's suburban high school. Other locations around Lemont were also used.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 54% approval rating based on 100 reviews, with an average score of 5.5/10 and a consensus: "This teen romance flick feels like a predictable rehashing of other movies." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 53 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Positive reviews praised the performances of Stiles, Thomas, and Washington. Desson Howe of The Washington Post said that Stiles and Washington were appealing performers and concluded, "Thomas is the movie's best element. He puts so much authority in his performance, he makes this controversial romance seem like the best thing that could happen to anyone. That's no easy task." In a three-star review, Roger Ebert said that despite the film's clichéd story and romance, "the development is intelligent, the characters are more complicated than we expect, and the ending doesn't tie everything up in a predictable way." Charles Taylor of Salon wrote, "for all its dumb clichés it offers the basic appeal of teen movies: the pleasure of watching kids be kids, acting as they do among themselves instead of how parents and teachers expect them to act." Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Mark Caro said, "On paper the movie is full of cliches recently explored elsewhere...Yet in this case the outline is not the story; the people who inhabit it are," and in this way, "Save the Last Dance triumphantly passes the audition." Negative reviews criticized the editing style of dance scenes, the film's "after-school special"-like subplot, and the script for not delving enough into the issues of interracial relationships. Critic Wesley Morris wrote "the movie combines the worst of urbansploitation with the worst of teensploitation, and outfits them both in makings of the ultimate racial-crossover melodrama -- teen motherhood, deadbeat teen dads, drive-bys, a dangerous ex-girlfriend, speeches straight from the pages of Terry McMillan." Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly wrote, "director Thomas Carter is afraid to pump up the volume on its own interracial, hip hop Romeo and Juliet story, lest it challenge even one sedated viewer or disturb the peace."