‘There Are No Children Here’

In her most serious role since “The Color Purple,” Oprah Winfrey (right) plays the real-life, down-but-not-out single mother LaJoe Rivers in this burnished, gritty 1993 TV movie. She’s a determined person who wages war on behalf of her kids from a squalid apartment in the Chicago housing project. Director Anita W. Addison doesn’t flinch from the requisite violence but she doesn’t exploit it either. Maya Angelou (left) plays LaJoe’s equally gritty mother (ABC Thursday at 9 p.m.).