MOVIE REVIEWS: “JUST WRIGHT”

Roger Ebert, in his review of Just Wright, credits its star, Queen Latifah, for holding the movie together. “Few people,” he writes, “and certainly no one in this film, can hold the screen against her. As with many other stars, when she’s in a shot, it’s about her.” But Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News, along with several other critics, says that’s a mixed blessing “As it turns out, director Sanaa Hamri depends a little too much on her charismatic star in the hopes that Latifah can elevate average material. And to an impressive degree, she does. But ultimately, this one-of-a-kind woman deserves more than a one-size-fits-all romance,” Weitzman writes. But Lou Lumenick in the New York Post argues that the movie makes a terrific vehicle for Latifah’s talents, calling it “a very rare contemporary romantic comedy that doesn’t succumb to terminal stupidity.” Jason Anderson in the Toronto Star also notes that it “breaks with the current conventions of Hollywood movies targeted at African-American audiences. There’s little of the broad comedy, mawkish melodrama or lessons on living a moral life that fill the hugely popular films of Tyler Perry. Instead, Just Wright is more like the kind of proficiently made and unrepentantly escapist romantic fluff that the Hollywood studios used to shill to love-starved moviegoers in the 1940s and ’50s but have little aptitude for these days.” Actually, writes Ty Burr in the Boston Globe, Just Write is one of the better Perry movies Perry hasn’t made yet.”