REVIEWED - DREAMGIRLS:Dreamgirls is a star- powered, fabulously cinematic adaptation of the Broadway play, writes Michael Dwyer

THERE was a time when musicals were magnets for Oscars. Between 1961 and 1968, four of the eight Oscar winners for best picture were musicals: West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and, Oliver! One of the earliest winners was The Broadway Melody of 1929, the first great backstage musical, a genre that produced such gems as 42nd Street, Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon and the 1954 version of A Star Is Born.

Now, in an era where musicals are as scarce as westerns, Bill Condon triumphantly revives the backstage musical in his exhilarating Dreamgirls, which leads this year's Oscar race with eight nominations; most unfairly, it has been overlooked for best picture and director. Its basis is a celebrated stage musical, written by Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger, which made its Broadway debut in 1981.

Condon's stylish screen treatment is respectful of its source and infused with a passion for the genre. In the classic backstage musical tradition, its protagonists are performers, and the movie charts their individual ups and downs with empathy and concern. There may be no business like show business, but few businesses so cruel.

Dreamgirls opens in early 1960s Detroit, shortly before the Motown sound broke out of the r'n'b charts into the pop music mainstream. The Dreamettes are an all-woman trio, modelled on The Supremes, who have been singing together since childhood.

Curtis Taylor Jr (Jamie Foxx), a car salesman with music industry ambitions - he's loosely based on the canny, manipulative Motown founder, Berry Gordy Jr - discovers The Dreamettes in a talent contest. He hires them as backing singers for a volatile, crotch-gyrating performer, James "Thunder" Early (an edgy Eddie Murphy in a lacquered bouffant hairdo) before giving them the stage in their own right.

The only way is up but, just as their career takes off, Taylor demotes Effie (Jennifer Hudson), a big singer with a bigger voice, and assigns the more svelte and glamorous Deena (Beyoncé Knowles), the Diana Ross surrogate, to lead vocals.

Condon sets their story against the social and political unrest of the era without ever overstating it - riots in Detroit, civil rights marches - and is equally effective in capturing the opportunism of the music business, as DJs are bribed to play and break singles, and as the powerful record companies seize on the best Motown songs as cover version material for white performers.

The core of the drama follows the rise of Deena's star in parallel with Effie's decline. The songs function to both reflect on and advance the narrative, and the result is more emotional than any spoken conversation could achieve in the context of the movie's musical milieu.

There is a heightened theatricality to Condon's staging of this rich material. Yet it is grounded in the essence of cinema - performance, art direction, costume design, lighting, camera movement and editing - for a fusion that is admirably and sometimes thrillingly effective. Only towards the end, in an overtly sentimental resolution that almost works, does the movie loosen its hold.

Dreamgirls marks a giant step for Beyoncé but, in the classic backstage musical tradition, it is Hudson, who suffered humiliation as a failed American Idol finalist on US television, who steals the movie. When Effie stands alone in an empty theatre and releases all her pent-up distress and defiance in the wrenching ballad, And I Am Telling I'm Not Going, Hudson pours her heart and soul into a powerhouse performance that re-defines the term showstopper.