The joyous, emotional and heart-breaking celebration of the life and music of Whitney Houston, the greatest female R&B pop vocalist of all time.... (Full plot summary below)
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The joyous, emotional and heart-breaking celebration of the life and music of Whitney Houston, the greatest female R&B pop vocalist of all time.
Leave your thoughts about Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody.
| Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperHouston basically gets the “Bohemian Rhapsody” treatment in that the film glosses over some of the darkest moments in her life. (in fact, Anthony McCarten is the screenwriter of both films), but it works beautifully as a feature-film biography highlighting one of the most incredible voices and one of the most infectious star personalities of a generation. |
| Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsThe actors and director Lemmons accomplish what the screenplay does only partially: make us believe the circumstances and the behavior. |
| The PlaylistSimon ThompsonA respectful, fitting, and far more honest account of what the artist nicknamed “The Voice” gave us, it’s a biopic that is up there with “Rocketman,” “Ray,” and “What’s Love Got to Do with It." |
| Movie NationRoger MooreThese movies are about reminding us how these songs made us feel when they were new, and how bowled over we were by the people who performed them. Ackie, Lemmons & Co. do that, and rescue Houston from her “tragedy” to remind us why the world fell in love with her and once-in-a-generation voice. |
| VarietyOwen Gleiberman“I Wanna Dance with Somebody” is the kind of lavishly impassioned all-stops-out biopic you either give into or you don’t — and if you do, you may find yourself getting so emotional, baby. |
| San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleIt’s easy enough to have problems with Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It’s not nearly as truthful or as dramatic as it could have been, and it glosses over things that could have added those elements. But it’s hard to argue with a movie-length experience of listening to Whitney Houston’s voice. |
| Rolling StoneDavid FearThere’s a constant feeling that a lot of hands were wrestling for the steering wheel of this biopic behind the scenes, with various parties pushing the story this way and that, even with the united goal of collectively crafting the greatest love letter of all. Yet Ackie just keeps her eyes on — and her energy directed toward — delivering a screen-worthy Whitney, scaling the heights and earning her Hall of Fame status. |
| The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyCritics will sniff, as they invariably do, about the familiar conventions of the music biopic. But the spirit of I Wanna Dance With Somebody transcends those conventions far more often than it gets weighed down by them. Anyone who loves Whitney Houston and her music will leave the film with that love reinforced — especially anyone who sees it in a theater with a wall-shaking sound system. |
| Wall Street JournalKyle SmithFollowing closely the standard playbook for biographical movies of the kind that television smoothly produced in the ’80s and ’90s, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody may score low on creativity and originality but it’s effective throughout. |
| TimeStephanie ZacharekThe movie isn’t a melodramatic tell-all, or a total downer. But it manages, even while being unapologetically entertaining, to feel like an honest reckoning with all the things we didn’t want to know about Houston at her fame’s height. It’s a film that takes our failings into consideration, rather than simply fixating on hers, a summation of all the things she tried to tell us and couldn’t. |
