Dreamgirls Reviews
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
...less compelling than the actual history of the Supremes. Similarly, the music felt like faxed-over Motown, a couple of generations less crisp than the original.
Full Review
| Original Score: 83/100
Arizona Daily Star
"Dreamgirls" is a nightmare.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
CinePassion
A musical for people who've forgotten how to listen, and how to feel
Top CriticA musical with energy and talent to burn but missing its heart.
Lessons of Darkness
Lacks the one quality that Marshall's sub-par Best Picture winner Chicago had going for it - an invigorating, irresistible, knockout score.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
OhmyNews.com
The big screen version is a deafening muddle, pulled apart by booming vocal power, melodramatic performances, and zips through time faster than Doc Brown's De Lorean.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Combustible Celluloid
This lackluster neo-musical only partially succeeds.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Richmond.com
When Dreamgirls is behind the mic, it's Oscar golden. But when it's powered by anything other than its pipes, say story-telling, it falls flat and hard.
Lawrence.com
It is big and showy and loud, but director Bill Condon's attempts to make the movie more socially relevant than the theatrical production instead just highlight what little soul was there in the first place.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
It reserves singing and dancing for the stage until Jamie Foxx just randomly bursts into verse while strolling down the street. Dreamgirls wants to be Effie but ends up as Deena: thin, smooth, unburdened by a personality.
State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL)
It's a laugh-out-loud moment when a hot R&B song is forever entombed as Pat Boone-style fluff. But that same sort of sanitization and sterilization has been applied to this film. Scrubbed clean for a shiny glow, most of the soul is gone from the story.
Full Review | Original Score: 2/4
eFilmCritic.com
A cliché-riddled storyline populated by unsympathetic characters and songs that repetitively bleed into one another to the point where we curse Motown for the R&B movement altogether.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Spirituality and Practice
The 1981 Broadway musical lumbers onto the screen saddled with clichés from every showbiz story ever made about the rags-to-riches saga along with songs that can't hold a candle to the Motown classics.
Full Review | Original Score: 1/5
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Aside from Jennifer Hudson's beefy performance, this black r&b musical never conveys much soul.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Cinema em Cena
Os realizadores exibem exatamente o mesmo preconceito que fingem condenar em seu longa, valorizando mais a estética do que o talento. Hipocrisia, Dreamgirls é seu nome.
| Original Score: 3/5
Apollo Guide
Worse than a movie of the weak (pun intended)
Full Review
| Original Score: 36/100
[Dreamgirls proves] again that transforming a hit Broadway musical into an equally spectacular movie is one of the most confounding tricks in show business.
| Original Score: 2/4
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.
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Dreamgirls may come up short in terms of originality and killer songs, but it wears its big, drippy camp heart on its sleeve.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Any director hoping to capture racism, catfights, and urban decay with music this square, and filmmaking this haphazard, is a fool.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
