Nine: Critic Reviews

Marshall's staging lacks the thrilling unity he brought to Chicago. The numbers, while lively, remain cluttered and stage-bound.

Straining to capture artistic frenzy, it descends into vulgar chaos, less a homage to Federico Fellini 1/2s 8 1/2 (its putative inspiration) than a travesty.

A musical that is hideously naff, shallow, creepingly misogynist, badly acted and as phoney as a three-lire bill.

Nine should have been called 4A 1/2 because it doesn't come close to the work of the master who inspired it.

It's a film within a film about a film within a film, and seems to lose layers of authenticity with each iteration, finally becoming a profoundly alienating experience.

The movie is full of risible pontifications about the nature of art but falls well short of capturing the angst of creative frustration.

Nine thrashes about in search of "cinema" the way a child thrown into the deep end of a pool flails for a flotation device.

The numbers are flashy enough to entertain, and the cast appealing enough to appreciate. Just don't expect to fall in love.

Loud, brash, brassy, sexy and sometimes tacky or silly, but always entertaining.

The performances are all outstanding, even better than those in Marshall's Oscar-winning Chicago.

Nine is, if not a grand work, terrifically tasty eye and ear candy. Two numbers -- from somewhat unexpected quarters -- are worth the price of admission alone.

It's all "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." That, my friends, pretty much sums up this silly, formless spectacle. For all its razzle-dazzle and brouhaha, 'Nine' is a bore, fading from memory almost instantly.

You long for the ghost of Lorenz Hart to be unleashed on the whole affair, with a hard blue pencil and a head full of rhymes.

Nine is just plain adrift in its own lack of necessity.

This has always been a show about the broads, and how they torment, tantalize, judge and revere the suffering mama's boy. The best way to approach Nine is as a fashion spread rather than an actual story.

It's a movie about a musical about a movie about a man's inner life -- surely we can eliminate some of the middle men.

Rarely have so many Oscar-winners struggled so strenuously for such meager payoff.

Nine expires in every sluggish, graceless scene.

The film suffers from the simple fact that its songs aren't memorable.

There's a lot of high-powered star wattage in Nine, but it never generates much heat.

Onstage, there was so much glamour I couldn't decide whom to concentrate on. In the movie, they're so obnoxious I just wanted them to shut up and go home. The movie is busy, but in their failed homage to Fellini, they've lost his mystery and humor.

Sophisticated, sexy and stylishly decked out, Rob Marshall's disciplined, tightly focused film impresses and amuses as it extravagantly renders the creative crisis of a middle-aged Italian director, circa 1965.

The jaw-droppingly awful Nine is the worst Broadway-to- Hollywood transfer since The Producers -- the cinematic equivalent of that movie's show "Springtime for Hitler."

How can a movie starring six Academy Award-winning actors be such a bore?

A fractured film about creative and coital conundrums that is best sampled like an array of Italian gelatos. In other words, don't complain about how it all works, just enjoy the yummy bits.