Amistad

Empire Christopher Hemblade

Spielberg has mounted a courtroom drama to rival the finest Grisham, with a coruscating civil rights debate resonating both within the film and into the present as the audience knows it.

Dallas Observer Michael Sragow

The movie has tremendous scope and charge and a dense period fabric, along with a volcanic performance by Djimon Hounsou, the West African actor who plays Cinque.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Thematically rich, impeccably crafted, and intellectually stimulating, the only area where this movie falls a little short is in its emotional impact.

USA Today Susan Wloszczyna

Sheer power, moral and otherwise. It possesses a massively majestic hero. [10 Dec 1997, p.D1]

Entertainment Weekly Michael Sauter

Becomes a too-stately courtroom drama, with the Africans in the dock, the issue of slavery on trial at didactic length, and the top-billed Morgan Freeman as an abolitionist shunted to the sidelines with too little to do. [26 Jun 1998, p. 130]

Washington Post Rita Kempley

Hounsou, a West African model with beauty and presence but no acting experience, carries much of the movie on his broad shoulders with surprising skill and strength.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

What is most valuable about Amistad is the way it provides faces and names for its African characters, whom the movies so often make into faceless victims.

Variety Emanuel Levy

Aiming to instruct as well as entertain --- and often struggling to reconcile these two divergent goals.

Time Richard Schickel

Alive to the--yes--sometimes humorous, and therefore humanizing, struggles of the slaves and their would-be rescuers to surmount the language and cultural barriers that separate them. [15 Dec 1997, p. 108]

The New Republic Sean Wilentz

Hopkins uncannily projects Adams's suppressed agonies as well as his querulousness, his zest for scholarship as well as his zest for political intrigue, his pragmatism as well as his idealism. [22 Dec 1997, p. 25]

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

Dwarfed by the enormity of what it means to illustrate, the diffuse Amistad divides its energies among many concerns: the pain and strangeness of the captives' experience, the Presidential election in which they become a factor, the stirrings of civil war, and the great many bewhiskered abolitionists and legal representatives who argue about their fate.

Austin Chronicle Russell Smith

Cinque, the rebel leader, is played by former model Hounsou, a mountainous figure who speaks in a gutteral roar and seems to embody the rage and confusion of an entire exploited continent.

San Francisco Examiner Barbara Shulgasser

Scenes go on and on in endless, witless dialogue, ever accompanied by John Williams' hideously gushing music.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Despite the Spielberg trademarks, a lavish attention to period detail and the occasional flash of visual potency, this is a picture you never get caught up in.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

What saved "Schindler's List" from this self-conscious nobility was the ambiguity of Oskar Schindler's personality and Spielberg's willingness to treat incendiary material coolly. The lesson he seemed to have learned there, that the strongest stories call for the greatest restraint, is one he has at least partially forgotten here.

Slate David Edelstein

After an electrifyingly feral opening, the movie settles down into a cogent courtroom drama, with no real cinematic highs but no jaw-dropping lows, either.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Consistently earnest and well-intentioned but only occasionally moving, despite the efforts of a generally top-notch cast.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Although the movie is moving and even funny in many places, it's also overextended. And composer John Williams's syrupy score practically oozes from your ears on the drive home.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

There's some excellent comedy early on involving the mutual incomprehension of Africans and Americans, though this eventually gives way to solemn, ethnocentric mush about one African's reading of the story of Jesus, demonstrating as usual that sustained subtlety is hardly Spielberg's forte.

Film Threat Tom Meek

Of the underutilized mega cast, Djmon Honsou shines the brightest. His portrayal of Cinque, the leader of the displaced band of African tribesmen, is devastatingly potent.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Spielberg uses a more conventional format than he did in the stripped-down black-and-white "Schindler's List,'' and delivers a film that veers between stoic political correctness and mushy pop-Hollywood platitudes.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Steven Spielberg's historical drama is more stilted and didactic than its fascinating subject deserves, gathering great emotional force only in a harrowing scene depicting the Holocaust-like suffering of slave-ship captives.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

A little like looking at pictures without a text to unify them… Prestige filmmaking bereft of inspiration -- sometimes even of the nuts and bolts of craft.