Owen Gleiberman Raves ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’

It’s quite strange how Sony Pictures has been hiding Kasi Lemmons’ Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” which is set for an Oscar-ready release on December 23rd.

It’s definitely been watched by a very select few, but barely any Guild screenings, nobody is really talking about it and if SP really wanted it to be seen then there’d be more buzz going around.

There is still a review embargo for “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” but Variety’s Owen Gleiberman included it in his top ten of 2022 and thus was allowed to write a nice lengthy blurb on it.

The kind of lavish impassioned all-stops-out pop-music biopic you either give in to or you don’t — and if you do, you may find yourself getting so emotional, baby. As Whitney Houston, Naomi Ackie is far from the singer’s physical double, yet she nails the hard part: channeling her incandescence. She shows you the freedom that made Houston tick and the self-doubt that ate away at her, until she fell from the mountaintop she’d scaled. The director, Kasi Lemmons, creates a portrait of Houston’s dilemmas and demons that’s bracingly authentic, from the drugs to the family backstabbing to the love relationship with Robin Crawford (Nafessa Williams) that a homophobic society made her feel compelled to repress, from the attacks she weathered for her music being “not Black enough” to the self-destructive refuge she sought in her relationship with the sexy scurrilous lightweight Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders). As Clive Davis, Stanley Tucci captures the Arista mogul’s bone-dry dictator-mensch savoir faire. Whitney gets dragged down by forces both in and outside her. Yet through it all, her voice, her songs, her artistry of faith shines like a rapturous light.

Gleiberman has a fairly eccentric movie taste (“13: The Musical” also made his top ten), so I wouldn’t be surprised if “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” still turns out to be a disappointment. What I do know is that the review embargo doesn’t lift until the week of release …

Directed Kasi Lemmons (“Harriet”) from a screenplay by Anthony McCarten, the writer behind biopics such as Darkest Hour and Bohemian Rhapsody, the film has Ackie playing Houston, the late iconic R&B singer whose hit song inspired the title.