Lee Daniels

A rubbernecker's movie....There's a new Zalman King in town, and his name is Lee Daniels.

Gabourey Sidibe brilliantly embodies the understandably bitter Precious, who shares her heartbreaking despair through extensive narration.

Like Anatomy of a Murder, The Graduate, and Daniels' own Precious rolled into one wacked-out bloody Southern Gothic that's considerably less than the sum of those parts...

Despite admirable work from Whitaker and Winfrey, Lee Daniels' The Butler is nearly crushed by its own symbolic weight and its contrivance of a central character arc from keeping one's head down to learning to stand up.