We sent an email to [email protected]
Didn't you get the email?
By joining, you agree to the Terms and Policies and Privacy Policy and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .
User 8 or more characters with a number and a lowercase letter. No spaces.
username@email
By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .
Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes
Trouble logging in?
By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .
By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.
Email not verified
Let's keep in touch.
Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:
- Upcoming Movies and TV shows
- Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
- Media News + More
By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.
OK, got it!
- About Rotten Tomatoes®
- Login/signup
Movies in theaters
- Opening This Week
- Top Box Office
- Coming Soon to Theaters
- Certified Fresh Movies
Movies at Home
- Fandango at Home
- Prime Video
- Most Popular Streaming Movies
- What to Watch New
Certified fresh picks
- 90% Wicked Link to Wicked
- 71% Gladiator II Link to Gladiator II
- 98% Flow Link to Flow
New TV Tonight
- -- Get Millie Black: Season 1
- -- The Madness: Season 1
- -- The Agency: Season 1
- -- Family Guy: Season 22.2
- -- The Later Daters: Season 1
- -- Tsunami: Race Against Time: Season 1
- -- It's in the Game: Madden NFL: Season 1
- -- Is It Cake? Holiday: Season 4
- -- Second Chance Stage: Season 1
Most Popular TV on RT
- 95% A Man on the Inside: Season 1
- 75% Dune: Prophecy: Season 1
- 100% Arcane: League of Legends: Season 2
- 92% Say Nothing: Season 1
- 84% The Day of the Jackal: Season 1
- 95% The Penguin: Season 1
- 86% Interior Chinatown: Season 1
- 96% Silo: Season 2
- 74% Landman: Season 1
- 77% Cross: Season 1
- Best TV Shows
- Most Popular TV
Certified fresh pick
- 86% Interior Chinatown: Season 1 Link to Interior Chinatown: Season 1
- All-Time Lists
- Binge Guide
- Comics on TV
- Five Favorite Films
- Video Interviews
- Weekend Box Office
- Weekly Ketchup
- What to Watch
Pedro Pascal Movies and Series Ranked by Tomatometer
Best New Christmas Movies of 2024
What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming.
Awards Tour
Renewed and Cancelled TV Shows 2024
Joan Chen Talks Dìdi and Judge Dredd on The Awards Tour Podcast
- Trending on RT
- Wicked First Reviews
- Gladiator II First Reviews
- Renewed and Cancelled TV
- Holiday Programming
Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody
Where to watch.
Watch Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody with a subscription on Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.
What to Know
Another wiki-biopic for posterity's sake, the relatively watchable I Wanna Dance with Somebody leaves you feeling like you were on stage with Whitney Houston, but didn't really get to dance with her.
Naomi Ackie does an outstanding job as Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance with Somebody , and even longtime fans might learn a few things about the singer's life.
Critics Reviews
Audience reviews, cast & crew.
Kasi Lemmons
Naomi Ackie
Whitney Houston
Stanley Tucci
Clive Davis
Nafessa Williams
Robyn Crawford
Tamara Tunie
Cissy Houston
Clarke Peters
John Houston
Movie Clips
More like this, related movie news.
- Share full article
Advertisement
Supported by
‘Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ Review: Her Lonely Heart Calls
This film from Kasi Lemmons is a jukebox retelling of Whitney Houston’s parabola from sweatshirts to sequins.
By Amy Nicholson
No one could sing like Whitney Houston, and Kasi Lemmons, the director of the biopic “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” only rarely asks her lead, Naomi Ackie, to try. This is a jukebox retelling of Houston’s parabola from sweatshirts to sequins, from church choir girl to tabloid fixture, from her teenage romance with Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), the woman who would continue on as her creative director, to her volatile marriage to Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders), who slithers into the movie licking his lips like he’s hungry to eat her alive.
Those beats are here. But it’s the melodies that matter, those moments when Ackie opens her mouth to channel Houston’s previously recorded songs. We’ve heard Houston’s rendition of “I Will Always Love You” countless times, and Lemmons bets, correctly, that the beloved hit will still seize us by the heart during the rather forthright montage she pairs with it, images of Houston marrying Brown, birthing her daughter Bobbi Kristina and honoring Nelson Mandela underneath a sky filled with fireworks.
Ackie doesn’t much resemble the superstar, although her carriage is correct: eyes closed, head flung back, arms pushing away the air as if to make room for that mezzo-soprano. That the film sticks to Houston’s surfaces is half excusable. The screenwriter Anthony McCarten seems to find that the woman underneath the pop star shell was still struggling to define herself at the time of her death at the age of 48. We see her raised to be the mini-me of her mother, the singer Cissy Houston (Tamara Tunie), complete with matching haircut, and then handed over to a recording label to be transformed into America’s Princess, a crown she wore with hesitance, and, later, resentment. (Stanley Tucci plays her friendly, Fagin-with-a-combover Clive Davis of Arista Records, who also produced this film.) At Houston’s final “Oprah” performance, recreated here, she belts an earnest ballad called, “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.”
Houston didn’t write her own material; she just sang like she did, courtesy of Cissy’s fastidious coaching. “God gives you a gift, you got to use it right,” Cissy lectures. Yet, Houston as seen here can only say yes or no to other people’s ideas of what she should sing, wear and do. (A camera pan suggests, unconvincingly, that Houston thought of the film’s title track as a love song to Crawford.) Increasingly, she chooses opposition. Her successes are shared — and her money swallowed up by her father (Clarke Peters), who was also her manager — but her mistakes are all hers. (Even though Lemmons takes care to include a scene in which Houston absolves Brown of her crack addiction.)
Houston’s defiance is the movie’s attempt to answer the great mystery of her career: why she deliberately damaged her voice through smoking and hard drugs. “It’s like leaving a Stradivarius in the rain!” Davis yelps. The trouble with a gift, the film decides, is it went undervalued by Houston herself, who assumes she’ll be able to hit bombastic high notes every night of her poorly reviewed final world tour. In this doomed stretch, the camera creeps so close to Ackie that you can count the beads of sweat on her nose. The smothering is heavy-handed, yet apropos for an artist who never had the space, or creative motivation, to fully express herself.
Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody Rated PG-13 for drugs, cigarettes and swearing. Running time: 2 hours 26 minutes. In theaters.
Find the Right Soundtrack for You
Trying to expand your musical horizons take a listen to something new..
Kim Deal is ready to go solo. It just took four decades.
How a tale of Sean Combs sex tapes landed one man in court.
Jesse Ed Davis was rock heroes’ secret weapon. And a mystery.
A stroke paralyzed Jesse Malin . Next month, he’ll stand onstage again.
The singer whose work feels like a prayer .
‘Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ Review: A Lavish, All-Stops-Out Biopic That Channels Her Glory and Gets Her Story Right
Naomi Ackie captures Whitney Houston's incandescence in Kasi Lemmons' bracing biopic.
By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
- ‘Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It’ Review: Eye-Opening Look at the Organ Prodigy Who Fused with the Beatles and Helped to Forge Funk 2 days ago
- ‘The Bibi Files’ Review: A Powerful Exposé of How Benjamin Netanyahu Has Prolonged the War in Gaza to Escape His Own Corruption Scandal 6 days ago
- ‘Gladiator II’ Review: Paul Mescal Is a Pensive Avenger in Ridley Scott’s Serviceable but Far From Great Sequel 2 weeks ago
Related Stories
A New Kind of Storyteller Is Needed for Immersive Entertainment
SAG Awards 2025 Preview: Breaking Down the Top Film and TV Contenders
Popular on variety.
She is more or less forced, by the music industry and by her manipulative business-manager father (played by the superb Clarke Peters), to hide her relationship with Robyn. She complies, though in a complex way, shunting Robyn to the side and sleeping with men, like Jermaine Jackson (Jaison Hunter), whom she’s attracted to, all of which feeds her without fulfilling her. She keeps Robyn hanging around, as her creative director and closest comrade, but Whitney also has a conflicted traditional side. She says she longs for a husband. Was Robyn Whitney Houston’s greatest love of all? The film answers that by dramatizing how the love that a homophobic society coerces Houston into repressing is at the heart of the traumas that come for her later. She denies who she is and keeps trying, and failing, to fill the void.
It doesn’t help that a segment of her audience turns on her for making pop music that’s “not Black enough.” Whitney herself, commiserating with Robyn, ruefully mocks the image she has to project in the “How Will I Know” video: flip, bouncy, and flirtatious, with a wig of taffy curls and the wholesome grin of what she derisively calls “America’s sweetheart.” That wasn’t her; her personality was grittier, wilder, tougher (she hated wearing dresses), and she felt alienated from the princess-next-door image she was selling.
The music, however, was another story. The movie shows us how Whitney meticulously chose among the songs Clive Davis found for her (he knew she couldn’t sell a song unless she believed in it), and how her taste was broader than traditional R&B because she’d grown up in a far more eclectic world. The songs reflected her spirit — and besides, it’s a form of elitism to believe that a pop song as luminous as “So Emotional” or “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” somehow lacks the “purity” of rock ‘n’ roll or R&B.
We see Whitney getting booed at the 1988 Soul Train Music Awards, and the film says it’s no coincidence that that’s the night she meets Bobby Brown, the sexy scurrilous lightweight she hitches herself to like a jalopy to hell. Ashton Sanders, who gave “Moonlight’s” greatest performance, plays Brown with just the right touch of slit-eyed saturnine opportunism. He and Whitney have a fatal attraction — she gives him respectability, he gives her street cred. And maybe she felt, too much, that she needed that. There’s a moment between them that’s so horrifying it’s funny: Bobby proposes to Whitney in the back of a car, and then, after he pops the bling on her finger, he drops some news he should have told her beforehand. This is who he is. So why did a star of Houston’s power and magnitude embrace this scroundrel as her romantic destiny?
The movie could have pushed the darkness a notch further, as Whitney spins down in a vicious cycle of splintered ego and self-destruction. “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” is frank enough about her cocaine addiction, but her dissolute final days are staged rather demurely. Yet through it all, we feel the terrible way that she’s pulled in all directions — a tricky thing for a biopic to dramatize, and this one does it thrillingly well. Kasi Lemmons’ staging has an unfussy intimacy, and she pulls off a coup by ending the film with one of Whitney’s greatest performances, though one that’s not nearly as famous as her “Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl. It’s her live performance of the medley of “I Loves You, Porgy,” “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” and the supremely devotional “I Have Nothing” from the 1994 American Music Awards, which builds and builds until her voice shines like a heavenly beacon. It lights the audience up.
Reviewed at Sony Screening Room, Nov. 30, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 146 MIN.
- Production: A Sony Pictures Releasing release of a TriStar Pictures, Compelling Pictures, Black Label Media, Muse of Fire, Primary Wave Entertainment production. Producers: Anthony McCarten, Pat Houston, Clive Davis, Larry Mestel, Denis O’Sullivan, Jeff Kalligheri, Matt Jackson, Molly Smith, Trent Luckinbill, Thad Luckinbill, Matthew Salloway, Christina Papagjika. Executive producers: Naomi Ackie, Janice Beard, Lexie Beard, Tanner Beard, Jane Bergére, Marina Cappi, Dennis Casali, Josh Crook, Matthew Gallagher, Erika Hampson, Stella Meghie, Rachel Smith, Seth Spector.
- Crew: Director: Kasi Lemmons. Screenplay: Anthony McCarten. Camera: Barry Ackroyd. Editor: Daysha Broadway. Music: Chanda Dancy, Whitney Houston.
- With: Naomi Ackie, Stanley Tucci, Nafessa Williams, Tamara Tunie, Clarke Peters. Ashton Sanders, Bria Danielle Singleton.
More from Variety
‘Back in Action’ Trailer: Cameron Diaz Ends Her 11-Year Acting Retirement by Teaming Up With Jamie Foxx for Netflix’s Spy Movie
The Great Cable Rollup That Will Never Be
Jake Paul, Mike Tyson Netflix Fight Sets Broadcast Team With Fight Week Events, Prelim Card to Stream Live (EXCLUSIVE)
Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson Fight: Netflix Draws Criticism for Buffering, Freezing and Lagging During Live Event
Entertainment Everywhere: A Special Report
Daniel Craig Wants Netflix to Put ‘Knives Out 3’ in Theaters for More Than Just One Week: ‘Hopefully, They Will Push It Out a Bit’
More from our brands, meet the beatles all over again.
Forget Comfort. Bentley’s New CEO Wants ‘Effortless,’ Driver-Focused Cars to Define the Marque.
F1 Finds Las Vegas a Gateway to Global Sponsor Deals
The Best Loofahs and Body Scrubbers, According to Dermatologists
Game Show Host Chuck Woolery, of Love Connection Fame, Dead at 83
IMAGES
VIDEO