Amistad Reviews

Dry and dawdling, haphazardly structured, and grindingly obvious.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Falta alma ao filme.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Amistad is an excellent story, poorly told.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Spielberg's considerable talent is not quite enough to unearth it

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Amistad is prestige filmmaking bereft of inspiration -- sometimes even of the nuts and bolts of craft.

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While the Africans [in Amistad] are tremendously sympathetic, the film maintains a distance from them, granting emotional access instead to the well-intentioned white guys.

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Amistad is a maddening film because it comes so close to greatness.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Strip it of its historical trappings, and Amistad is really just another courtroom drama -- a particularly manipulative one to boot.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

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

Full Review | Original Score: B-

Spielberg seems to be dividing his filmmaking output into two distinct halves: in the summer months cranking out no-brainer dinosaur flicks...in the winter season unveiling his serious artistic stuff to edify the adults and woo the Oscar crowd.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

In Amistad, an admirable but disappointing effort...[Speilberg] veers between stoic political correctness and mushy Hollywood platitudes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

A true Amistad movie should be a highly emotional tale about the courage and will of the Africans themselves not the American-centered courtroom drama that Spielberg has made.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Full Review | Original Score: C

Full Review | Original Score: C

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

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

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

The essential commitment to freedom is so much a part of the story that, at least in this one brief moment, justice triumphed.

| Original Score: B

Powerful story for mid-teens and up.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Fortunately, the dry, courtroom banter is interjected with powerful accounts of the violent, inhumane atrocities inflicted on the slaves by Spanish merchants.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Spielberg errs on the side of right and moral decency, and as a cinematic essay on a subject of universal validity plus eternal currency, it deserves -- and justifies -- genuine praise both as entertainment and as history lesson.

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