For Colored Girls
Lionsgate | Release Date: November 5, 2010 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
50
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 33 Critic Reviews
Positive:
12
Mixed:
11
Negative:
10
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleNov 4, 2010
The effect is like watching an opera without music. Or a musical drama in which no one sings. These departures from a realistic convention never feel like static set pieces - that's the great success of the film and of the poems themselves. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisNov 4, 2010
As it turns out, Mr. Perry, while busily establishing his economic independence, has been finding his voice as a filmmaker. And here, working with fine performers like Ms. Elise, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad and Kerry Washington, he sings the song the way he likes it - with force, feeling and tremendous sincerity. Read full review
88
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanNov 4, 2010
The writer-director waited until he had the clout, budget and prestige to attract a top-flight cast, then turned Colored Girls into a movie with a little less darkness but plenty of heart and guts. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesBetsy SharkeyNov 4, 2010
Whatever stumbles there may be, they are offset by moments when For Colored Girls soars. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerNov 13, 2010
A long wallow in misery and, after a while, the pain morphs into polemic. Read full review
75
Orlando SentinelRoger MooreNov 3, 2010
Perry's great gift to this unfilmable play is getting it on the screen, his sharp eye for casting and his evident affection and sympathy for black womanhood, even in movies in which he doesn't don a dress. Read full review
70
Chicago ReaderAndrea GronvallNov 4, 2010
Perry benefits from the fire, heft, velocity, and lyricism of the language, but he also updates the material and makes it work onscreen, eliciting powerhouse performances from an ensemble of actresses. Read full review
67
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallNov 3, 2010
For Colored Girls is blessed with a Murderer's Row of black female actors, each tearing ferociously into Shange's words and gamely hanging on through Perry's. Read full review
65
MovielineMichelle OrangeNov 4, 2010
Perry weaves together not just the individual stories but their arcs, sustaining the emotional tenor across the progress of nine lives. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeWesley MorrisNov 4, 2010
It's too much too-much. The audience I saw it with didn't seem to know whether to clap when it was over or start taking Lipitor. Read full review
63
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie RickeyNov 4, 2010
At its best, Shange's work is a lyric journey through the storm to the rainbow. At its worst, Perry's movie is a relentless dance between the victimizer and his victim. Shange's poetic flow gets choked by Perry's stilted prose. Read full review
63
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertNov 3, 2010
Perry tries to be faithful to the play and also to his own boldly and simply told stories, and the two styles don't fit together. Read full review
60
SalonMatt Zoller SeitzNov 5, 2010
Perry never solves the stage-to-screen translation problem. But the path he has chosen is as intriguing as it is irksome, and it works better than you might expect. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanNov 5, 2010
"This is a woman's trip," it is announced in Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls, and how you respond to those words will likely determine how you respond to the film itself. Read full review
60
Boxoffice MagazineAmy NicholsonNov 3, 2010
These ladies - even at their weakest - carry themselves with the confidence of winners, and we cling to their strength like a life raft. Read full review
60
Time OutLisa RosmanNov 3, 2010
But something compelling happens here that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Raging in Shange's still startlingly fluid verse like witches casting spells, this powerful cast (especially Jackson, Goldberg and Phylicia Rashad) reaches bravely, if sometimes clumsily, for emotional accountability. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenNov 10, 2010
Though he has stepped up his game, Perry's plainspoken, unsubtle aesthetic is an uncomfortable match for the fragility of Shonge's speeches, and scenes abruptly switch between the language of Perry's scripted continuity sequences and sudden poetic soliloquies. Read full review
50
St. Louis Post-DispatchKevin C. JohnsonNov 5, 2010
In the end, the movie is still a poetic injustice. Read full review
50
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottNov 5, 2010
The hard, cold truth is that the hard, cold For Colored Girls is just plain difficult to fall in love with, regardless of the amount of passion Perry poured into it or how much meaning he's freighted it with. Read full review
50
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzNov 3, 2010
There's no question that Black women are underrepresented in movies. There's also no question that when they get a chance to perform, they deserve a better movie than For Colored Girls. Read full review
42
The A.V. ClubKeith PhippsNov 4, 2010
There's no right way to do an adaptation, particularly a difficult-to-adapt work like this, but there are plenty of wrong ways, and Perry's film offers a casebook of things-not-to-do. Read full review
42
Entertainment WeeklyLisa SchwarzbaumNov 3, 2010
Perry has taken Shange's feminist word-and-movement portraits of disenfranchised African-American women and turned those howls into...a maddeningly choppy mess of a Tyler Perry movie. Read full review
40
VarietyPeter DebrugeOct 31, 2010
The result falls squarely in familiar territory, better acted and better lit, perhaps, but more inauthentically melodramatic than ever. Read full review
38
New York PostLou LumenickNov 5, 2010
"Precious" worked partly because it did not wrap its sordid tale in Christian uplift and dime-store psychology -- elements that have made Tyler Perry a rich filmmaker but have turned For Colored Girls shrill and manipulative. Read full review
38
USA TodayClaudia PuigNov 4, 2010
Kimberly Elise gives the best performance as a beleaguered woman with an abusive boyfriend (Michael Ealy). Read full review
38
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsNov 4, 2010
Aiming for a piece with the raw impact of "Precious," on which he served as executive producer, he (Perry) ends up with 134 minutes of misjudged intensity. Read full review
30
TimeMary PolsNov 4, 2010
For Colored Girls feels like the cinematic equivalent to putting a garish reproduction of the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of your McMansion and calling it art.
 Read full review
30
Village VoiceMelissa AndersonNov 2, 2010
The greatest frustration-not just in For Colored Girls, but in Perry's entire oeuvre-is witnessing talented (and often criminally underemployed) actresses struggle with the material they've been given. Read full review
30
The Hollywood ReporterKirk HoneycuttOct 31, 2010
(Perry) style is too crude and stagy for Shange's transformative evocation of black female life, and his moralizing strikes exactly the wrong notes to express the pain and longing that cries out from her heated poetry. Read full review
25
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyNov 5, 2010
The film is a mawkish mess, only occasionally alleviated by the performances or Shange's poetry. Read full review
25
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanNov 4, 2010
It's hard to imagine that any self-respecting man would want to sit through two hours - let alone two minutes - of such caustic man-bashing. Read full review
25
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezNov 4, 2010
With such a large cast, none of the actors is able to turn her character into a fully realized person. Read full review
20
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinNov 8, 2010
He (Perry) has taken Shange's landmark poem cycle for seven African-American actresses, cut it up, and sewn its bloody entrails into a tawdry, masochistic soap opera that exponentially ups the "Precious" ante. Read full review
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