Perry's Funeral Home

Yet there was a core of furious sanity to her lunacy. She’d been seduced and betrayed, and she stood in for all the women who had ever felt used in that way. She may have snapped, but on the movie’s terms she’d earned the right to go off her rocker.“Tyler Perry’s Acrimony” is Perry’s inside-out, topsy-turvy, screw-loose variation on “Fatal Attraction.” In this case, the vengeful hellraiser at the film’s center keeps telling us that she’s justified. Yet the more you look at her actions, the more she just seems nuts.Melinda, played by Taraji P. Henson in her mode of trademark wrath, gazes out from the screen with an anger so coldly consuming it turns her skin to ash. The movie opens in a courtroom, where Melinda, in purple lipstick, scowling like a kabuki puppet, is chastised by the judge for failing to obey a restraining order. We then see her in a therapist’s office, brooding and chain-smoking as she looks back on the relationship that ruined her life.More ReviewsWhat we hear on the soundtrack (and a lot of this movie — too much of it — is Taraji P. Henson telling us things on the soundtrack) is a narrative of absolute betrayal: the con man named Robert who seduced Melinda with his lies and his soft-spoken manner, and who took all her money, and kept lying and stealing and betraying. No wonder she felt like she had to get even. With every hoarse breath, she tells us: The bastard had it coming.But everything that happens in “Acrimony” seems off-kilter, because the story the movie presents doesn’t track with the lurid nightmare of gaslighting that Melinda is telling us. As the film goes on, Melinda is revealed to be a deeply unreliable narrator. But the trouble with this love-story-from-hell thriller — and the reason it may leave even Perry’s fans scratching their heads — is that Perry, in “Acrimony,” is a grabby but unreliable filmmaker. He has made a ludicrously scattershot drama in which overwrought feminine rage, diary-of-a-mad-woman craziness, and inept filmmaking ar... (Variety)

Yet there was a core of furious sanity to her lunacy. She’d been seduced and betrayed, and she stood in for all the women who had ever felt used in that way. She may have snapped, but on the movie’s terms she’d earned the right to go off her rocker.“Tyler Perry’s Acrimony” is Perry’s inside-out, topsy-turvy, screw-loose variation on “Fatal Attraction.” In this case, the vengeful hellraiser at the film’s center keeps telling us that she’s justified. Yet the more you look at her actions, the more she just seems nuts.Melinda, played by Taraji P. Henson in her mode of trademark wrath, gazes out from the screen with an anger so coldly consuming it turns her skin to ash. The movie opens in a courtroom, where Melinda, in purple lipstick, scowling like a kabuki puppet, is chastised by the judge for failing to obey a restraining order. We then see her in a therapist’s office, brooding and chain-smoking as she looks back on the relationship that ruined her life.More ReviewsWhat we hear on the soundtrack (and a lot of this movie — too much of it — is Taraji P. Henson telling us things on the soundtrack) is a narrative of absolute betrayal: the con man named Robert who seduced Melinda with his lies and his soft-spoken manner, and who took all her money, and kept lying and stealing and betraying. No wonder she felt like she had to get even. With every hoarse breath, she tells us: The bastard had it coming.But everything that happens in “Acrimony” seems off-kilter, because the story the movie presents doesn’t track with the lurid nightmare of gaslighting that Melinda is telling us. As the film goes on, Melinda is revealed to be a deeply unreliable narrator. But the trouble with this love-story-from-hell thriller — and the reason it may leave even Perry’s fans scratching their heads — is that Perry, in “Acrimony,” is a grabby but unreliable filmmaker. He has made a ludicrously scattershot drama in which overwrought feminine rage, diary-of-a-mad-woman craziness, and inept filmmaking ar... (Variety)