Phylicia Rashad

Rating: 3.5/5.0

CHICAGO – The stunning looks of Halle Berry is always the lead whenever the entertainment media considers her. But in “Frankie and Alice,” she reminds us of why her career continues to flourish and why she is a Best Actress Oscar winner.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf” was a landmark event in 1974, giving voice to a segment of society rarely seen on the stage. It took 34 years for a filmmaker to tackle this remarkable work in film form and Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls” retains some of the inherent power of it source and features some strong performances in the process but never finds the narrative cohesion needed to translate it to modern movie audiences.

Rating: 3.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Romantic comedies are a roving beast in the Movie Zone, one that can never be captured properly time after time, yet never dies either. Queen Latifah and the rapper Common put an interesting and necessary twist on the genre, but still cannot help but fall back on the recurring rom-com clichés that eventually undermines the new film “Just Wright.”