Emancipation

The hollow Emancipation is a mismatch between director and subject.

Fuqua’s chosen technique only undermines his solemn intentions, rather than using starkness to make a salient point. Emancipation is overthought to its increasing detriment.

There’s a pronounced Hollywood-ized feel to the finished product, one that doesn’t compare favorably with other projects that have covered similar territory.

The storytelling is propulsive, but it’s cheapened by crude and manipulative film-making choices.

Emancipation is a relentlessly grim, unnecessarily stylised and frequently monotonous film.

A movie that's part prestige drama, part survival thriller, part war epic -- and all confused. The film's mishmashing of these genres is careless.

Fuqua and Collage had the opportunity to give the man from the famous picture a voice. To show who Peter might have been as a person, and not only display the suffering he experienced. And it slipped through their grasp.

[A]s an action, [Emancipation is] not half-bad... But looking at it in the context of a somehow burgeoning field of slave narratives, the lack of nuance feels not only lazy but exploitative.

Emancipation strives to be the strong surprise of the year but doesn’t fully come together. Smith? Excellent might even be his best performance! Powerful imagery, great cinematography, but a one note story that I found to lack depth

Its release was overshadowed by that Oscars slap , and that’s a shame. Those who fixated on the buzz rather than on the film missed out on a terrific and engaging bit of cinema that is arguably Fuqua’s most fully realized film since “Training Day.”