Rosewood: Critic Reviews

Neither the film's smug white bigots nor its uniformly noble blacks are well served by such oversimplification.

It's doubtful a viewer of any race will be unshaken by this horrifying look back during Black History Month.

If the movie were simply the story of this event, it would be no more than a sad record. What makes it more is the way it shows how racism breeds and feeds, and is taught by father to son.

Although it increasingly succumbs to a tendency toward conventional movie heroics, John Singleton's fourth film tells a story of rare interest and tragedy...

An epic that stands alone in the latter weeks of a dismal movie winter.

Rhames' gravity and grace, Voight's pinched anguish as he wills himself to do right, the moving work of actors like Don Cheadle and Esther Rolle do much to redeem this film for human if not historical reality.

The need to bear witness against atrocity, to testify that something wicked this way came, is the powerful drive that animates Rosewood, the story of an American tragedy so horrific no one talked about it for more than half a century.

The intentions are unassailable: to dramatize a forgotten injustice and sear it into contemporary memory so it's never allowed to happen again. But the movie is long and didactic, undermined by the faintly pious air of an educational slide show.

Stirring story, indifferently realized.

John Singleton, with Rosewood, proves himself to be a capable and talented director, bringing to life a piece of violent American history that some would have preferred left unremembered.

Gripping and pretty darn tense historical drama.

...the more the body count mounts, the more cartoonish the movie seems, and the less we care.

A charged, wrenching drama about one of the most shameful events in American history.

Instead of simply stating that the racism is bad, Singleton tries to explain it through characters, which are multidimensional and believable, regardless of their race.

Decent effort, but couldn't decide if it wanted to be a historical drama or an action flick.