Amistad Reviews
Critic & User Reviews
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Critic Reviews
Thematically rich, impeccably crafted, and intellectually stimulating, the only area where this movie falls a little short is in its emotional impact.
Read the full reviewHounsou, 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.
Read the full reviewWhat 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.
Read the full reviewDwarfed 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.
Read the full reviewAiming to instruct as well as entertain --- and often struggling to reconcile these two divergent goals.
Read the full reviewAfter an electrifyingly feral opening, the movie settles down into a cogent courtroom drama, with no real cinematic highs but no jaw-dropping lows, either.
Read the full reviewAlthough 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.
Read the full reviewWhat 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.
Read the full reviewSpielberg 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.
Read the full reviewReview excerpts provided by Metacritic.com.
The Metascore® designation for this movie is 63
User Reviews
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