Amistad: Critic Reviews

Halfway into Amistad comes the point where Steven Spielberg pulls the lever, and the stink and horror and bestialities of slavery spill around our ankles. We can't look away.

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.

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.

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

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

Powerful story for mid-teens and up.

Amistad is worth seeing just for people to know about this important story, this moment in history. But from the world's most powerful, successful and famous director, we expect more.

Aiming to instruct and entertain, and often struggling to reconcile these goals, Amistad lacks the subtlety of tone and simplicity of form that made Schindler's List one of Spielberg's very best; here, however, every idea and image are too explicit.

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

Amistad is the telling of an interesting event in American history, but doesn't draw its audience in to the heart of the story.

This is the most straightforward, understated, and powerful big-screen representation of the gospel in recent movie history. And for that, Amistad should be recommended to everyone.

As with Schindler’s List, Spielberg allows his subjects to be remote and somewhat unknowable human beings, creating an air of documentary-like authenticity.

Amistad is the kind of movie that makes a tired topic seem fresh and entertaining again.

Just when you thought you had seen the best movie there is about a historic seagoing vessel, along comes Amistad.

Spielberg's films never lack a certain degree of narrative and visual force, but his tendency toward sentimentality, a strictly antipodal, Good-vs.-Bad conception of character, and an insensitivity to structure have consistently marred his work...

Steven Spielberg's engaging, heartfelt and well-made drama delves into a critical incident in the history of slavery in America.

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

Despite its occasional imperfections...Amistad must be regarded as a monumentally impressive achievement and further proof of Spielberg's ongoing maturation as an artist.

Falta alma ao filme.

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

Celebrates the holy grail of freedom and how the quest for justice is supported by the spirits of ancestors .

The whole historical untouchability of a Very Important Film & the incredibly dry nature of the facts was what made this production a lose-lose proposition for Spielberg.

Brief moments of visceral fire allow glimpses into the rousing movie this could have been.

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

Steven Spielberg shows the same kind of fire and passion he did in directing Schindler's List as the horror of slavery is laid bare in the crucible of the courtroom.