CHICAGO (2002). Rob Marshall's first feature film (he comes to the movies from the Broadway stage) is a razzle-dazzler -- and a great movie musical. The material has a pedigree: Maurine Watkins's hard-boiled 1926 comedy about a jazz baby who plugs her departing lover and goes on trial for murder; William Wellman's memorable 1942 movie, Roxie Hart (with Ginger Rogers in the title role); Bob Fosse's Broadway hit and its recent revival. Marshall's movie is a valentine to Fosse: the intercutting of the songs and dances with the plot (which provides a breezy Brechtian commentary on the action and the characters) extends the use of the musical sequences in Cabaret. But the tonal shifts in "Nowadays," the finale, which starts as a torch song for a faded Roxie and metamorphoses into a joyous duet with her prison rival, Velma Kelly, are Marshall's own. Renée Zellweger's kewpie-doll sexy Roxie suggests cotton candy with a bourbon chaser, and she heads a cast without a single dim bulb: a relaxed -- and surprisingly light-footed -- Richard Gere as Roxie's lawyer, Billy Flynn; Catherine Zeta-Jones in razor-cut bangs as Velma, whose arrest for double murder sets the picture in spin; a raucous Queen Latifah as the sharp-eyed prison matron; and Christine Baranski as the sob sister Mary Sunshine, who delivers bathos to her radio audience with glittering irony. (107m)

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