'For Colored Girls'

Bob Mondello reviews 'For Colored Girls':

As it turns out, some very fine performers — Phylicia Rashad, Loretta Devine, Thandie Newton and Kimberly Elise among them — are acting the hell out of the poems, with results that are simultaneously more intimate and less affecting as the film labors to turn figures who were archetypes on stage — The Lady in Red, The Lady in Yellow, etc. — into characters of flesh and sinew, and to make the verses they speak sound like dialogue. I'd say the film mostly achieves what it sets out to do, and is consequently less than it wants to be.