Richard Brody’s End-of-Year Movie Picks

The musician Blitz Bazawule’s first feature, “The Burial of Kojo,” was one of the independent-film treasures of 2018. His second outing is on an altogether grander scale—a musical version of “The Color Purple,” opening Dec. 25—but he brings to it the same imaginative flair that graces his low-budget work. The movie is adapted both from Alice Walker’s novel and from Marsha Norman’s musical libretto. It follows a Black woman named Celie—played, in her youth, by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi, and, as an adult, by Fantasia Barrino—through the early twentieth century in the rural South. As a child, Celie is repeatedly raped by her stepfather (Deon Cole), and she has two children with him, who are taken from her; she’s then forced to marry a man called Mister (Colman Domingo), who beats and demeans her. The drama involves Celie’s liberation from domestic oppression and her efforts to reunite with her children and with a long-lost sister; the story of endurance and overcoming is driven by its fervent and steadfast performers, especially Mpasi and Barrino, along with Danielle Brooks (as Sofia, the wife of Mister’s son Harpo) and Taraji P. Henson (as the blues singer Shug Avery), with rousing musical numbers as emotional anchors.