Powerful stuff.

Rating: 9/10 (8 January 2007)

What's better than seeing a really good film? Seeing a really good film for free at an advance screening! The point was to get the film notice via word of mouth, and I am more than happy to do my bit. This is an excellent film, and Forest Whitaker totally deserves the Oscar buzz that he's got going  managing to make Idi Amin believably charming is the easy bit, but being terrifyingly monstrous without resorting to Paciono-esquire scenery chewing is a great achievement. The film perfectly strikes a difficult balance between accurately conveying the horror of the situation without using unrealistic Christ like characters, as Hotel Rwanda suffered from. James McAvoy's Nicholas is, essentially, not a pleasant character, but is the one to root for by virtue of being less bad than Amin. By making the characters believably flawed, the whole comes off as more powerful and moving than several similar movies, and is well worth seeing. Top class.