The film’s masterful prologue writes a check that the remainder of this very long, very indulgent film labors mightily to cash.
The film is unmistakably alive to the humiliations of the social systems that keep the lower classes in their place.
The result is an uncomfortable mix of the trite social politics of Paul Haggis’s Crash and the shallow character development of Pulp Fiction.
Power is a warmed-over soap opera only superficially obsessed with its protagonist’s relationship to guns and drugs.
Whitney Houston’s death is just about the only thing that gives Sparkle any real, albeit unintentional, life.
Tyler Perry’s histrionic For Colored Girls is purple in more ways than one.
The film is a standard product fresh off the assembly line, so polished and fine-tuned that the opening and closing credits are but a formality.