The Color Purple

(1985; screens Saturday at noon)

Whoopi Goldberg is marvelous in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of the Alice Walker novel about the spiritual education of a young black woman in Georgia during the first decades of this century who spends years as a domestic and sexual slave to the domineering brute (Danny Glover) she's married off to. But instead of giving the characters and relationships room to breathe, Spielberg dictates your response in almost every scene, turning this story of grit and hardship into something approaching a Norman Rockwell idyll.