An extraordinary must-see film!

Rating: 10/10 (1 March 2005)

I attended this film reluctantly, not expecting to enjoy the viewing but wanting to accompany my wife to the movie of her choice. How wrong I was! Ray turned out to be one of the best Hollywood films I have ever seen and Jamie Foxx is one of the most deserving Academy Award winners of recent years. He was Ray Charles for the period of the film: he had mastered Ray's mannerisms, his speech patterns and became Ray Charles for the time of the film. I don't believe a greater accolade could be given an actor than to say that for the period of the film, the viewer lost sight of the unreality of that which they were watching-you became immersed in what was essentially "reality TV" or documentary. The sense of viewing a movie was lost and to me there can be nothing greater said about a film than that the film loses totally that sense of movie unreality. When Hollywood gets it right, the result is sublime-a product unequaled anywhere in the world. The problem is-they miss far more often than they hit-Ray is the exception that proves this statement.
Hackford's direction was as sublime as Foxxe's acting. As a rule, I am absorbed more by a film's visuals than I am by the acting or story; with Ray, however, I had to remind myself to pay attention to the camera work and the shot selection because the story and Foxx's remarkable portrayal continually pulled me away from the film's images. Hackford's use of flashbacks contributed to this, for me, unusual perception of the film. These flashbacks fleshed in segments of the script that would be difficult to stitch together without them.