STRAW

Here is the honest tension. Tyler Perry has made a compelling, well-acted thriller with a heart that Scripture would recognize. Janiyah loves her neighbor, gives what little she has to a homeless man, and fights with everything in her to care for her daughter. Those are real virtues, and the film means them.

But the cost is steep. The screenplay carries 106 obscenities — 36 of them the "f" word — plus intense bloody violence in which people are shot and several die onscreen. That volume of foul language is not incidental; it saturates the film. A worthy theme cannot rinse it out.

So our answer is plain: this one isn't for your family. The craft is genuine and the moral center is real, but the content puts it out of bounds for the readers we serve. Skip it, and don't feel you've missed the better part.

Janiyah is a single mother living in extreme poverty, working two jobs to pay for her daughter's medicine. Her day begins the way too many of her days begin — her landlord threatening eviction before she's even out the door.

From there the losses pile up, one after another, until a desperate woman walks into a bank to cash a check she can't cash. What happens next is an accident she never intended — and it puts her at the center of a standoff with the police, with only one thing on her mind: finding a way back to her daughter.

Three stars, and they're earned. This is a Tyler Perry production, and the acting delivers what you'd expect — Taraji P. Henson anchors a story that keeps its grip even when the plotting strains. The premise leans hard on coincidence: the sheer number of catastrophes crammed into a single day stretches belief past its limit.

Still, the film is compelling. It moves, it holds you, and it builds real tension out of a woman's unraveling day. As a piece of storytelling craft, it works. The problems here are not problems of quality — they're problems of content, and that's a different conversation.

At its core, STRAW believes what Scripture believes about a mother's love and a neighbor's welfare. Janiyah is a portrait of sacrificial care: two jobs, crushing poverty, and still she gives spare change to a homeless man who has less than she does. The film lifts up charity, generosity, and the command to love your neighbor — and lets the people around Janiyah honor her for living it. There's even a Gospel song about a mother who prays for her children each morning as her day begins. The emphasis on a parent's duty to protect a child at all costs runs all the way through.

Alongside that biblical current runs a lighter, politically charged one. Several characters argue that America systematically keeps black people from getting ahead — a framing the film presents as its social diagnosis. Readers should know it's there and weigh it as they will.

And the film's own hero survives by lies, threats, and coercion once the standoff begins — desperation, not virtue, and the movie doesn't pretend otherwise.

Beneath it all is a mother who would do anything to save her child. Scripture points past that fierce, human love to a Father whose care never fails: "Can a woman forget her nursing child... Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you" (Isaiah 49:15).

STRAW is a well-made film with a genuinely biblical heart — a mother's love, a neighbor's welfare, generosity out of poverty. But 106 obscenities and bloody, deadly violence put it beyond what we can commend to you. So our verdict stands: skip it. Looking for something the whole household can enjoy instead? Try our latest family-friendly picks.