- 8
It's not a perfect film, but then again, it never really could be. For Colored Girls was never intended to be one, in all honesty. What Tyler Perry does here is daring, provocative, and a little arrogant. Some in the audience will "get it" and that's all that matters.
—Bill Gibron filmcritic.com
- 8
...[Perry] sings the song the way he likes it ? with force, feeling and tremendous sincerity.
—Manohla Dargis New York Times
- 8
It is a film destined to polarize. Many will hate it. Hopefully more will love it, or at least allow room for it, for its raw brutality, its extremes, its difficult truths.
—Betsy Sharkey Los Angeles Times
- 7
A veritable who's-who of A-list African-American actresses populates For Colored Girls, and their performances keep this highly theatrical script from suffocating the big screen.
—Dezhda Gaubert E!
- 6
Many in the audience will have seen it onstage, and that will be an advantage; they'll understand what [director] Perry is attempting. Ordinary moviegoers, accustomed to Perry's mainline films, are likely to be thrown off by the unconventional approach here. 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.
—Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times
- 4
...134 minutes of misjudged intensity.
—Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune
- 4
For Colored Girls's undiluted hysteria would be completely obscene if it weren't so unintentionally hilarious.
—Ed Gonzalez Slant Magazine
- 4
Monologues and melodrama rarely work in contemporary movies exploring social ills.
—Claudia Puig USA Today
- 4
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.
—Lisa Schwarzbaum Entertainment Weekly
- 4
...shrill and manipulative.
—Lou Lumenick New York Post
- 4
Though the text of the playwright's most affecting poems is virtually intact, Perry has unmistakably wrestled Girls into the same soap-opera mold of his earlier pics.
—Peter Debruge Variety
- 4
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.
—Scott Tobias Onion AV Club
- 3
Though striving for artistic legitimacy in bringing Shange's incomparable play to the screen, Perry indulges his worst instincts for melodrama in For Colored Girls, shoehorning her text into his own tawdry narrative.
—Melissa Anderson Village Voice
- 2
...a train wreck of a movie...
—Kirk Honeycutt Hollywood Reporter
- 1
...terrible... [15 November 2010, p.38]
—Alynda Wheat People