Hotel Rwanda Review

Terry George has said he made it by asking whether it would play in Peoria, and the film is shaped by that question. It keeps the killing mostly at the edge of the frame, in radio broadcasts, roadblocks and distant gunfire, with one terrible exception: a dawn drive along a riverside road through fog, where the van starts bumping over bodies. That sequence is the film's best, and the restraint elsewhere is a choice with a cost. The Village Voice complained that the genocide is only glimpsed secondhand, and the PG-13 caution sometimes shades into tastefulness.

Don Cheadle is the reason it works. His Paul is a manager first, a man who believes in hospitality, favours and good Scotch, and the performance tracks the slow collapse of that faith without ever raising its voice; Sophie Okonedo is just as good as his wife Tatiana, and both were nominated for Oscars. Nick Nolte's UN colonel, modelled on Roméo Dallaire, gets the bitterest speech. The history is contested: Dallaire felt the film undersold what his men did, and later books, one co-written by a survivor of the hotel, dispute Rusesabagina's account. As a way into the event for a wide audience, it still does its job.