For Colored Girls (2010): United States – directed by Tyler Perry
Rated R by the MPAA – contains strong language, domestic violence, sexual content, sexual violence
Tyler Perry’s first foray into straight drama is an interesting mix. I’m not familiar with “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” Ntozake Shange’s seminal choreo-poem often considered a cultural marker. I do know many African American communities were up in arms when it was announced Perry would be adapting it, and Oprah and other influential people were brought in to consult. The play, an assortment of poetry expressing the lives of seven African American women, is fluid and impressionistic, I’m told. It lacks the hard details necessary for a successful translation into film, but this very characteristic made it so powerful on stage.
Perry has worked many of the themes from the poem into a screenplay, adding characters and settings in an attempt to make it real. His version has nine women whose lives are all interconnected, like a facile version of Magnolia [review here].
The Kids Are All Right appears, on the surface, to be a conventional family drama/comedy about an unconventional family. Normally, if one were to praise a film, he or she might comment with something like, “but it goes so much deeper,” or “but if you look really closely.” Unfortunately, The Kids Are All Right barely manages to successfully be a conventional film about an unconventional family.
An initial fear when hearing about Davis Guggenheim’s documentary on public education might be that it is one-sided, heavy-handedly liberal, unabashedly Democratic. It is to the director’s credit that it remains centered, objective, and incisive, as it dissects a system that has evolved nearly to a point of no return. It is clear something must be done with public schools, but he offers few solutions short of moving entirely to charter schools. And maybe that’s what’s necessary.
There’s a sparseness to Winter’s Bone, and a tone reminiscent of 
The Fighter is a passion project, on a number of levels. 
I’m not sure any of Exit Through the Gift Shop is real. There’s a very good chance it occupies a strange place between the obvious prankery of 
The story may not be well-known to many Americans; it certainly wasn’t to me. But it is a fascinating story, and, in some ways, a highly significant one. A king, without power but beloved by his people, must deliver a stirring address as the nation approaches a war with a neighboring state. But there is a catch, and a not-inconsequential one: he stammers.