Nine

Review by Sean Lynch

When it comes to musicals, the ol' "Style over Substance" line isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, some of cinema's greatest musical moments are vibrant, beautifully visualised and downright non-sensical. 

Thankfully, Nine director Rob Marshall has picked up a few tricks since helming the Oscar winner Chicago and ensures that he includes dabs of both substance and a wealth of style with his latest release.

Nine is vibrant, provocative, stylish and sexy in every way a musical possibly can be as it follows the life of the world famous film director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he reaches a creative and personal crisis of epic proportions. 

A crisis, mind you, which rears it's ugly head as Contini is in the midst of balancing the numerous women in his life (including his wife, his mistress, his film star muse, his confidant and costume designer, an American fashion journalist, the whore from his youth and his mother).

Yep - life is tough when you're a super rich, super fashionable film dude!

There is a true ensemble feel to Nine (with an astonishing cast including Daniel Day-Lewis, the understated beauty of Marion Cotillard, a stand out turn from Penélope Cruz, the always reliable Judi Dench, a genuinely scary-faced Fergie, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman, and a cartoonish looking Sophia Loren) which is somehow both completely cinematic in nature, while still managing to capture the very intimate feel of a live stage musical.

Marshall has really put something wonderful together here, with Nine delivering some of the most lush, large and lavish images to hit our screens in some time - and there isn't a CGI monster or landscape in sight either!

That said, some of the Italian accents can sway from "perfect" to "piss-take" - but it's hardly going to have audiences throwing tomatoes at the screen.

Very much the close Italian cousin of Marshall's Chicago (using the musical sequences to represent what's going on inside the character's heads), Nine is a celebration of life, love, culture, females and fashion - a package which creates such a joyous sense of fun and class to a genre that is so often clouded by camp.

Well worth checking out.

4 out of 5

Nine
Australian release: 21st January, 2010
Official Site: Nine
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Fergie, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren
Director: Rob Marshall