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100Deep movie emotions for me usually come not when the characters are sad, but when they are good. You will see what I mean.
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100An extraordinary and effective film.
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100Emerges as an African version of "Schindler's List."
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100Enraging and enthralling.
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91Several times, Hotel Rwanda teeters on the edge of making a unique, visionary statement about our times, but can't quite do it. Too bad. If it could have pulled itself together in one brilliant scene, this may have been a great movie, instead of just a very good one.
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90Cheadle impressively carries the entire picture, delivering the kind of note-perfect performance that's absolutely deserving of Oscar consideration.
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90A startlingly effective and upsetting political melodrama.
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90It is a powerful portrait of a slightly befuddled man who, when inhuman demands were placed on him, found within himself an unexpected response.
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90Magnificent.
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90The film turns into a triumph for Don Cheadle, who never steps outside the character for emotional grandstanding or easy moralism.
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88Not a striking film visually. It's deliberately plain looking, focused on the appalling events with an almost documentary immediacy.
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88One of the year's best.
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88A gut-punch of a drama.
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88This role could represent a career performance for Cheadle, whose forceful and multi-dimensional portrayal keeps Hotel Rwanda at a consistently high level.
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88By turns harrowing and stirring, it’s a shame-inducing history lesson that never feels like a lecture.
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88An articulate plea to Westerners not to repeat these terrible sins of omission.
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83Cheadle's performance elevates Hotel Rwanda, making it a film that does justice to the tragedy it commemorates.
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80It's a weighty message movie, but it's a message worth delivering – and the cast's delivery is flawless.
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80Hotel Rwanda, based on real lives and events, aims unequivocally to break your heart.
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80Cheadle, always a fine actor, is outstanding here--an almost willfully naive yet uncommonly decent man who sees civilization crashing and burning around him yet who, almost against his own better judgment, refuses to give in to it.
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80Ultimately, one's reservations are overwhelmed by the story's urgency; it's impossible not to be shattered.
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80Cheadle is extraordinary.
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80Hotel Rwanda isn't impersonal, even though it only hints at the story's full horror. It's stunning.
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80It sweeps over you with blunt, unequivocal conviction.
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80Cheadle's quiet, superbly modulated performance as an ordinary man driven to heroism by hellish events reminds us that the slogan "no justice, no peace" has a private as well as a public dimension.
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78Scrappy, powerful, and shocking.
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75George has been criticized for simplifying a complex story into an African "Schindler's List." But despite flaws in execution, this is a film of rare courage and imperishable heart.
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75All we can do is hope that films such as Hotel Rwanda remind us all -- moviegoer and politician -- of the terrible cost of doing nothing.
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75In condensing Rusesabagina's story, George has undoubtedly overstated the specific dramatic moments; the movie has more cliff-hangers than the "Indiana Jones" series.
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75I wish Hotel Rwanda felt like something more than a very, very good TV movie.
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75Throughout the film, Cheadle's eyes are constantly scanning his environment for opportunities or anything that may be amiss.
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70It's a great part for a great actor and Cheadle does a magnificent job turning this living legend back into flawed, flesh-and-blood reality.
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70The Rwandan genocide was one of the most shameful marks on Bill Clinton's presidency, but for all the film's powerful images, George stops short of the forceful political statement that Rusesabagina's story demands.
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70It's a gut-twisting story handled, largely and predictably, with asbestos mitts.
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70The story it tells is such a wrenching one it cannot help but move us, especially when the performance of a lifetime by Don Cheadle is added to the mix.
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70A political thriller based on fact that hammers every button on the emotional console.
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70The genocide of some one million Rwandan Tutsis by their Hutu neighbors remains a disgraceful and too-little-known episode in recent world history. Alas, Terry George's ineffectual Hotel Rwanda only partly rectifies that problem, taking what ought to have been a complex, powerful inquiry and simplifying it to a story about the resilience of the human spirit.
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58A strange history lesson that leaves us more overlectured than properly overwhelmed.
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50The subject is crucially important, but the movie dilutes its impact with by-the-numbers filmmaking, and Cheadle's one-note performance displays few of his acting gifts.
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40The film presents the Rwandans in the worst possible way: venal, corrupt, vicious, stupid, barbaric and completely incapable of governing themselves. Honestly, I've seen more intelligent and sympathetic depictions of Africans in Tarzan movies.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 124 out of 139
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Mixed: 1 out of 139
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Negative: 14 out of 139
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10
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10Amazing film. If I told myself Catch A Fire was a movie Iâ