"For Colored Girls's undiluted hysteria would be completely obscene if it weren't so unintentionally hilarious." - Ed Gonzalez

Given the subject matter, it has to be empowering to be good. But I didn't find it to be so.

It's occasionally over-the-top, it has trouble finding a format, and the last shot is an embarrassment, but it's just a relief that a movie about black women that's not poverty porn like Precious exists, and my god what an absolutely incredible cast.Thandie Newton, Kerry Washington, and especially Loretta Devine absolutely kill it.

Perry's weakness for the lowest common denominator transforms both anger and affirmation into sludge, not great poetic cinema like Spielberg's The Color Purple, Jonathan Demme's Beloved or Rodrigo Garcia's Mother and Child.

Well acted and interesting film, which handles multiple intertwining plots better than most that attempt this. Be warned this has HIV, graphic rape, back alley abortion, children getting murdered, wife getting beaten, and a lot of people having really bad days. But the plot does move forward, and there is a point to it all. Unlike, say, Babel.