Given the movie's subject it seems trivial to say so, but the best reason to see Hotel Rwanda is to watch Don Cheadle as Paul and Sophie Okonedo as his wife Tatiana. Okonedo was the standout in Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things last year (click here for my review), but Cheadle has been around for a decade without landing a role that built on his exciting breakthrough performance in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). He may get his due now. Cheadle and Okonedo's faces are so sensitively mobile as they play off each other that the pleasure they give you as actors is almost comic. Which, oddly, rounds out the movie more than George, with his limited world view and his reliance on heroic romance, is able to do. The only part of the historical recreation that worked for me worked at a pretty low level--it's hard not to choke up when you see children threatened with machetes. But Paul and Tatiana's alertness to each other, their palpable interreliance, don't seem as if they could possible have resulted merely from rehearsals. When I say that I would happily watch Cheadle and Okonedo in anything, however, I don't mean more movies like Hotel Rwanda.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.