“Susan Stroman serves up an old-school staging, complete with painted backdrops and showbiz pizzazz, makes the whole thing self-aware — enough to disarm any defenses against silliness. The stagey approach culminates in the movie’s best known sequence: ‘Puttin’ On the Ritz’ blossoms from a goofy front-curtain routine to a full-scale fantasia with a chorus of top-hatted, tailcoated monsters tap dancing their heads off beneath a frenzy of strobes. It must be the most purely joyful 10 minutes in town.”