For Colored Girls

For Colored Girls (2010) — watch Tyler Perry's ensemble drama online on iFILM. The film adapts Ntozake Shange's landmark 1975 choreopoem and grounds it in the lives of nine Black women living in a shared orbit in New York, each carrying a different wound.

Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Tessa Thompson, Kimberly Elise, Phylicia Rashad, and Whoopi Goldberg each take one thread — abuse, grief, longing, betrayal — and Perry's screenplay lets those threads tighten around each other slowly. The film doesn't rush toward a single resolution. It's built on accumulation: stories piling up until the weight of them becomes the point.

Shange's original work has been a touchstone of Black feminist literature for fifty years. Perry's version is more literal and grounded than the source, which will disappoint some readers and open it up to others. Either way, the cast earns every one of its 134 minutes. Stream For Colored Girls (2010) online on iFILM.