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]

What brings the movie alive is the performance that Diana Ross and director Sidney J. Furie bring to the scenes. Read full review

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.

By any formal standards, it is a mess, but, surprisingly often, a moving mess. [23 Nov 1972, p.77]

Clearly, it’s an affront to Holiday’s art, but just as clearly, it’s a good piece of low entertainment. Read full review

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. Read full review

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]

The former lead singer of the Supremes is on-screen from start to finish, which is to say almost endlessly, but her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché. Read full review

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. Read full review

The life and the lady have been slicked up and toned down, in the best tradition of such tears and tinsel sagas as The Helen Morgan Story and I'll Cry Tomorrow, in which lovers are long-suffering and steadfast, agents loyal, temptation rife and facts irrelevant. Billie Holiday, an artist, deserves a far better memorial. Read full review

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