Director Terry George's Hotel Rwanda is being compared with Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields.
Opening locally today, Hotel Rwanda is certainly filled with as much outrage for an equally unimaginable campaign of genocide as what the Nazis attempted in Europe and the Khmer Rouge inflicted upon Cambodia.
George's film just lacks the production values of the earlier films it recalls, and that does dull some of its potential impact. Then again, George's intent all along may have been to tell one man's story, rather than a nation's story, through the eyes of one man.
If that's the case, George magnificently accomplished what he set out to do through his casting of Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina, the accommodating manager of the magnificent Belgian resort Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali.
Here is a performance that shines because it is so controlled, so restrained and so honest. There is not one moment in Cheadle's performance that tries to make Rusesabagina anything more than an ordinary man thrust into heroism because his job taught him how to manipulate rich, powerful people.
In the spring of 1994, underground radio broadcasts were inciting the Hutus of Rwanda to rise up against their Tutsi neighbours.
No one could have imagined that within four months, machete-wielding Hutu street gangs would slaughter more than one million people while the world sat back, watched and did nothing.
Rusesabagina managed to save a small enclave of 1,268 men, women and children of both Hutu and Tutsi heritage by manipulating everyone from politicians to military leaders.
It is an astonishing story of resolve and courage, and Cheadle's genius is that he makes us see ourselves in Rusesabagina.
Cheadle has to be one of the top contenders for this year's best-actor Oscar - the nominations will be announced Tuesday - because it is a towering, heartfelt, heart-wrenching performance.
George gives his audiences glimpses of the slaughter in Rwanda and they are shocking and unsettling but, like the rest of his film, they are seen through Rusesabagina's eyes rather than through a camera hovering above the unspeakable holocaust.
Nick Nolte has some fine moments as the man in charge of the United Nations peacekeepers plagued by the impotence of his organization and the failure of the rest of the world to become involved.
Joaquin Phoenix is barely recognizable as the bearded cameraman who observes the horrors first-hand but he has two compelling scenes.
It seems strange at first that George should spend so much time on the love story in Hotel Rwanda, but through their characters' relationship, Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo show how powerful love is and how resilient the human spirit can be.
Hotel Rwanda is an important film because it reminds us that complacency is an unforgivable sin and it's one the world committed that spring and summer of 1994.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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