Dreamgirls: Critic Reviews

Dreamgirls is the rare movie musical with real rapture in it.

Audiences who go to Dreamgirls will have a good time, but theyll be going for old times sake rather than to encounter anything vital or new.

There is no single person or story to centre the drama around, and Murphy's performance, though widely liked and indeed now Oscar-nominated, is for my money flatly written with very little of the high comedy octane of which we know he is capable.

Jennifer Hudson is the heart and soul of Dreamgirls. When she's on the screen, the movie shines. When she's not, the whole endeavor suffers.

...An uneven success.

Any director hoping to capture racism, catfights, and urban decay with music this square, and filmmaking this haphazard, is a fool.

With a star turn like [Jennifer Hudson's] at its center, a movie doesn't need too much more, but Dreamgirls has plenty to go around.

When she sings 'And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going' -- one of the most heartfelt cries of pain ever written for a musical -- Hudson inscribes her name on an Oscar.

When Jennifer Hudson sings, all's right with the world.

Joy is defined as Dreamgirls, an ecstatic dose of pure top-down Motown tight-harmony effervescence that takes a hit Broadway musical about a Chicago girl group and turns it, miraculously, into a Hollywood delight.

Dreamgirls sizzles most of the time, giving us a slightly Broadway-ized look at an important part of the history of American pop music.

It's fun. It's candy. With colorful costumes, often effervescent tunes (the original production's Henry Krieger wrote four new ones), it's a champagne cocktail.

There's so much excitement around the opening of Dreamgirls... that I know I'm going to bring down the room by saying I think it's just okay. Well, Jennifer Hudson is more than okay.

Fulfills the ecstatic promise inherent in all musicals -- that life can be dissolved into song and dance -- but it does so without relinquishing the toughest estimate of how money and power work in the real world that song and dance leave behind.

As much as I appreciated the performances from the terrifically talented cast -- as much as I liked Dreamgirls -- I didn't love it. Maybe it was just a little too slick and over the top for its own good.

Condon knew what he wanted, and got it: a smooth, shiny showbiz fable.

Elegiac, filthy-minded, unsparing, and as deeply moving as you'd expect from any de facto story of Peter O'Toole's life.

Bill Condon's screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway sensation is, if possible, as dazzling and energizing as its source.

If what you value in a movie musical is visual extravagance and a show-stopping performance or two, Dreamgirls will leave you with a feeling of absurd, unreasoning happiness.

Dreamgirls is a knockout, no two ways about it, a sizzling adaptation of the successful Broadway musical that is bound to leave audiences howling with pleasure.

How many of us have a chance to visit Broadway and see an A-quality show? That's the experience with Dreamgirls, and there's something to be said for it.

Flashy, flamboyant and ferocious, Dreamgirls is just plain socko!

I have to admit that the film's spectacular performances and production values will blow you away much of the time -- and for that, Mr. Condon and his many colleagues deserve to be commended.

Stays true to the source material while standing on its own as a fully reimagined movie.

Flaws and all, Dreamgirls is certainly a lot more watchable than other recent adaptations of Broadway musicals like Rent, The Producers and The Phantom of the Opera.