Dreamgirls Reviews
It compares to that other "legitimate" musical smash of recent vintage, Chicago. It just doesn't have the life or fun of Chicago.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The opening rump-shaking immediately sets the tone: Dreamgirls pulses with sheer exuberance. When was the last time a musical, much less a huge Hollywood production, felt this alive?
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/6
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.
Watching Dreamgirls on the big screen feels like an event somehow. Maybe it's the conviction and passion that the actors bring to their roles.
Dreamgirls is the entire musical package, a triumph of old school on-screen glamour, and we wouldn't want it any other way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Elegiac, filthy-minded, unsparing, and as deeply moving as you'd expect from any de facto story of Peter O'Toole's life.
It's a product that promises magic, and yet gives us nothing to live on.
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.
Dreamgirls wraps you up in its music, like a velvet coat of sound, and when it's over you feel warmed, happy and thoroughly entertained.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
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.
| Original Score: 3/4
This glitzy, infectious and unusually heartfelt musical doesn't always hang together as a satisfying narrative -- too many characters compete for too little screen time -- but its pleasures are numerous enough to override its flaws.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Dreamgirls sizzles most of the time, giving us a slightly Broadway-ized look at an important part of the history of American pop music.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
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
Dreamgirls is like a really fabulous party. The next morning, you don't remember anything special that happened, but you know you had a blast.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Bill Condon's screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway sensation is, if possible, as dazzling and energizing as its source.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
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.
| Original Score: 3/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
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
This is the first important movie musical in decades about African-Americans and the first to deal with the revolution in civil rights and the mainstream success of black pop music.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Condon has gotten terrific performances from almost everyone here. Knowles lives up to the promise she's shown in her earlier big-screen warm-ups. And Hudson proves to be as good in her dramatic scenes as she is in the musical ones.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Full of strong performances and outsize musical energy, Dreamgirls has all the makings of a big-time holiday hit, and it deserves to become one.
| Original Score: B+
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
An "American Idol" rejectee with no prior screen experience, [Jennifer Hudson's] presence in this film is itself the stuff that musical dreams are made of.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Condon knew what he wanted, and got it: a smooth, shiny showbiz fable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
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.
I've been going to the movies a long time. This is the first time I ever saw people sit during the closing credits, just so they could cheer when a performer's name came up.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Film director Bill Condon keeps that story on track, while cramming the screen with wonderful visual touches.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
When Jennifer Hudson sings, all's right with the world.
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 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
The corn may be as high as Beyoncé Knowles' gravity-defying wigs, but you'll be so carried away by the penny-arcade clamor of light, rhythm and song, you really won't care.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Dreamgirls is the rare movie musical with real rapture in it.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
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.
Flashy, flamboyant and ferocious, Dreamgirls is just plain socko!
Dreamgirls is a wonderful entertainment: a musical that, while not skimping on the music, delivers a multi-layered storyline featuring complex characters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
TIME Magazine
Top CriticIt's great to see a movie musical with a smart sense of the genre.
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.
My guess is that fans of the musical will love it. But it's a little short on heart and soul, and it is deeply conventional.
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The movie belongs to Hudson as the proud, self-destructive Effie. When she's center stage, Dreamgirls transports you to movie musical heaven.
A musical with energy and talent to burn but missing its heart.
Stays true to the source material while standing on its own as a fully reimagined movie.
