Sparkle Reviews
Top CriticSparkle shamelessly piles on the clichés, but it's an entertaining ride throughout.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Noteworthy only for featuring Whitney Houston's last screen appearance.
Sparkle is an assembly of parts and pieces from other, better movies - an overly familiar jumble of clichés mashed together.
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| Original Score: 2/4
"Sparkle" isn't blindingly original but it delivers solid entertainment, and despite the clichés I was never for a moment bored.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Anyone who has seen Dream Girls, What's Love Got To Do With It? or even The Doors will find themselves in familiar (if inferior) territory here ...
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
It's nice that "Sparkle" honors the memory of Motown's heyday; if only it could have lived up to those standards.
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| Original Score: C
Often seems like a flat, straightforward Supremes biopic in its adherence to seemingly pointless scenes and exposition.
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| Original Score: 2/4
"Sparkle" trafficks in the same gorgeous Motown style -- sonic and visual -- that made the original film, and "Dreamgirls" after it, such delectable fun.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Generally improves on the source material as much as possible while still succumbing to some of the same hoary showbiz beats.
"Sparkle" was made by smart people who built on their star's strengths, accounted for her weaknesses and didn't lean on her to carry the whole picture.
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| Original Score: 3/4
If the film is a sudsy show-business Cinderella story in which Emma's youngest daughter, Sparkle (Jordin Sparks), ascends to glory, Houston's presence makes it a cautionary tale.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The melodramatic story is familiar, though the talented cast makes the most of rather tired material.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Houston's performance proves that this could have been the first step not merely in a comeback but in a major re-invention. She had the instincts of a superb character actress.
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| Original Score: B-
Tika Sumpter [is] the best actress of the three ...
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| Original Score: 2/4
Where the original Sparkle was a ghetto melodrama with equal parts mob and music, the Akils have refashioned it into a saga of family rupture and reconciliation.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A bright and breezy musical that puts a breath of spring in this clammy late-summer season.
It's a fun, sudsy tale of show-biz ups and downs, with an endearing Sparks in the title role as one of three singing siblings in Motown-era Detroit.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
As the insecure, innocent ingenue, Sparks, 22, seems a bit tentative at first. But like her character, she gains her footing.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Whitney Houston deserved better than to go out onscreen with this botch job remake of a 1976 soap opera that never deserved another thought.
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| Original Score: 1/4
The performances through "Sparkle" are strong - Sparks has a gentle, sweet little-sister quality that draws you to her, nicely balanced by Ejogo's smoldering fire - and the colorful 1960s costumes (by Ruth E. Carter) and elaborate hairstyles are a kick.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The look, styles, dialogue and attitudes all feel more 21st century than 1968, but this new Sparkle still sparkles more brightly than its 1976 namesake, which was a sort of rough draft for Dreamgirls.
Sparkle deals in such well-worn rise-and-fall music-bio tropes that it's hard to blame it for simply coasting on narrative shorthand at times. But the lackadaisical storytelling can inch toward outright laziness.
It's a better movie than what's inspired it, but that fails to explain much. It's like preferring the line at the concession stand to the one for the bathroom.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The forebear's underwritten melodrama has been supplanted by Tyler Perry-like soap operatics and much jawing about the Lord, riots in the Motor City, marriage proposals, and maternal heartbreak and disapproval.
"Sparkle" is pure melodrama, but it's a high-powered, well-acted, entertaining melodrama. You may not always believe it, but you won't be bored.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Sparkle, while occasionally silly in a way that made a preview audience titter, is decent entertainment.
...the movie is an unholy mess of awkward staging, uneven pacing, and contrived 'big scenes'...
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| Original Score: 2/5
A strong cast, empathetic direction and memorable soundtrack help create a movie that does everyone proud.
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| Original Score: 3/5
