Lady Sings the Blues

Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor are good, but the real surprise is Ross. She's so magnetic that you can't believe this melodrama didn't lead to a real movie career. [06 Nov 2005, p.76]

The film, which also stars Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor, plays fast and loose with the facts, but there's no denying Ross' powerful turn as the troubled singer -- she received a best actress Oscar nomination. [08 Nov 2005, p.E5]

The chemistry of pop vulgarization is all-powerful here; factually, this life of Billie Holiday is a fraud, but emotionally it delivers.

The film serves as a very good screen debut vehicle for Diana Ross, supported strongly by excellent casting, handsome 1930s physical values, and a script which is far better in dialog than structure.

This is impressive on costuming and hunk fronts (with Billy Dee Williams the key factor in both), while Diana Ross is better than OK in a performance whose Oscar nomination was probably a fait accompli. Otherwise, this lumpy 2 1/2-hour biopic of Billie Holiday hasn't improved since it was critically drubbed -- four other nominations or not -- as one of the most ponderous of all showbiz chronicles. [11 Nov 2005]

It’s an amateur star performance-as-Stanislavski mail order catalog: a powerhouse of Method-ology (born more from a lack of acting experience than pop singers’ already refined sense of emotive abandon), complete with ingénue tics, a self-conscious display of age range, tentative ad-libs, flailing limbs, leaky eyes, precariously receding eyelids.

What it tells you most about is those kitschy concepts of 'stardom' and the like on a soap-opera/backstage drama level.