| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 11, 2006

Nothing that happens seems the least bit believable, and everything is brash and loud. All that's missing is the laugh track.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 10, 2006

Perry's vaudevillian shamelessness and indifference to committee-approved taste are energizing and frequently jaw-dropping.

Full Review | Mar 7, 2006

Tyler Perry's heart is in the right place, but he still has a tin ear.

| Mar 7, 2006

At times it feels as if Perry made three separate films, dumped them in a blender and hit the puree button.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 3, 2006

Let's not sell Tyler Perry short. As the vinegar-witted Madea, he's a drag performer of testy charm, but in his overlit patchwork way he's also making the most primal women's pictures since Joan Crawford flexed her shoulder pads.

| Original Score: B | Mar 1, 2006

Though Perry's films are hard to defend on aesthetic grounds -- the crazy shifts in tone from operatic melodrama to broad comedy could cause seizures -- it's equally hard to begrudge the underserved audiences who embrace them so passionately.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Feb 28, 2006

Family Reunion doesn't know if it wants to be a comedy or a drama and ends up as mostly a melodrama with scenes that would be embarrassing on a soap opera.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 27, 2006

This movie's trailers promise a slapstick comedy about an obese black woman who takes no guff and enjoys beating people up. It isn't exactly, and that's a disappointment.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 27, 2006

Too bad the story is so predictable and the big wedding scene, in which women dressed as angels dangle from the church ceiling strumming harps, is cornier than an Orville Redenbacher factory.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Feb 27, 2006

Like horror flicks or family films, Tyler Perry's Madea movies -- based on his enormously successful plays -- are a genre unto themselves, which means one thing: Either you are going to see them or you are not, and no review will change your mind.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 27, 2006

Brimming with cliches, Madea, like Diary, has an undeniable appeal, for those who can stick with it, in its earnest and unfashionable conviction.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2006

A generally enjoyable mess.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 27, 2006

Some parts of Tyler Perry's new movie are better than others -- and all of it is better than Diary of a Mad Black Woman, his last one.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 27, 2006

This happy mash-up of romance, drama, low comedy and high drama works because it is all tied together by Perry's open-hearted conviction.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Feb 27, 2006

"Trapped in the closet" fittingly describes Tyler Perry's lurid melodrama, in which characters repeatedly stumble onto others' dark secrets during living room chats.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Feb 26, 2006

Anyone curious about all the fuss surrounding Perry is advised to track down a DVD of one of his stage productions; Madea, his big mama, is not working on the big screen.

Full Review | Original Score: .5/4 | Feb 24, 2006

The heavily melodramatic tone that predominates throughout much of the pic could have used more leavening with comic relief.

Full Review | Feb 24, 2006

If you liked it before you will like it here. If, on the other hand, you find these trite recitations of overwrought stereotypes tiresome, you've probably already avoided the previous movie and the plays and should continue doing so.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 24, 2006

There's a ragged road-show texture to Madea's Family Reunion, which, along with the rest of the movie, would be easy to dismiss if one didn't suspect that it might be calculated.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 24, 2006