NINE: this judge awards zero point zero for entertainment

It's official. I do not like films directed by Rob Marshall. 
"Chicago" was a boring stage-bound adaptation of a musical offering just one memorable song; "Memoirs of a Geisha" was a chick-flick with not one single solitary point of interest for male viewers; and NINE is simply boring.

Not being a Broadway aficionado, I didn't realise the film's based on a hit show though I should have guessed. The action has been opened up more than it was in the film version of "Chicago"  but it's still largely stage bound, with characters that are more at home under the proscenium arch than on the big screen.
The biggest clue though is the collection of tuneless songs which repeatedly interrupt the flow of the story. Each of the film's many stars gets their own big production number, allowing them to express at great length their feelings towards the central character Guido Contini, played by Daniel Day Lewis. And it's here that NINE goes one better than "Chicago" because there's not even one memorable, hummable song among them.
Contini is a thinly disguised version of celebrated Italian film director Federico Fellini. His movies have come to define 1960s Rome to the world, but the maestro's struggling for inspiration for his new movie. He has a title, "Italia" and a star in Claudia Jenssen (Nicole Kidman) but with the start of shooting just ten days away he still doesn't have a script. With two flops behind him, the weight of expectation on him to create a hit is so heavy he's literally finding it hard to breath. 

These professional pressures are compounded by his complicated personal life. He's trying to placate an unhappy mistress (Penelope Cruz) and an even more unhappy wife (Marion Cotillard) while also living up to the expectations of his dear departed mama (Sophia Loren).
On paper this all looks like an interesting premise for a film but it transfers to the screen as dull, self indulgent and directionless. It requires an iron will to stay with the film through it's first fifty shapeless minutes when there's little discernable forward motion to the plot. 
Director Marshall tries to recreate the look and the feel of a Fellini movie but the result is a pastiche which totally misses the point. It's like recreating the Mona Lisa using paint by numbers. The end product looks the same (the visuals are impressive and the sequences in black and white are particularly effective) but it's obviously not the Mona Lisa, and in Marshall's case, having a cast of Irish (Day Lewis), British (Judi Dench), French (Cotillard), Spanish (Cruz) and Australian (Kidman) actors speaking in faux Italian accents really doesn't help.
NINE should have been released on Thanksgiving. It has turkey written all over it.