Nine Review

Rob Marshall's method is to play every song as a fantasy staged inside someone's head on a bare soundstage, which in Chicago gave the numbers a reason to exist. Here it strands them. Guido Contini, a director with a start date and no screenplay, has to be Fellini and a sinner in the confessional at once, and Day-Lewis, committed as ever down to the vowels, cannot sing the part.

His numbers are half spoken and cut around, so the character who should be driving the music stands outside it. That leaves the women carrying the film in isolation from each other. Marion Cotillard's Take It All is a real piece of work, a stripping away performed as rage, and Fergie's Be Italian has the only choreography with heat in it.

Judi Dench and Sophia Loren are given entrances and then forgotten. Kate Hudson's new song belongs to a different decade and a different movie. The worst decision is the cutting: Marshall fragments every routine so that no dancer holds the frame for longer than two seconds, which hides the staging and drains the pleasure out of watching people dance. The confessions land without any of the guilt that would make them cost something.