It is a film that embodies a set of events filmed during 1923. The film revolves around three excellent people from other circumstances who unite together. Perhaps these people are taking a series of daily challenges in order to save the innocent white racists who always attack black people.
The need to bear witness against atrocity, to testify that something wicked this way came, is the powerful drive that animates Rosewood, the story of an American tragedy so horrific no one talked about it for more than half a century.
...the more the body count mounts, the more cartoonish the movie seems, and the less we care.
Maitland McDonagh
TV Guide
April 28, 2010
The intentions are unassailable: to dramatize a forgotten injustice and sear it into contemporary memory so it's never allowed to happen again. But the movie is long and didactic, undermined by the faintly pious air of an educational slide show.
Although it increasingly succumbs to a tendency toward conventional movie heroics, John Singleton's fourth film tells a story of rare interest and tragedy...
Scott Weinberg
eFilmCritic.com
April 03, 2005
Gripping and pretty darn tense historical drama.
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
January 01, 2000
If the movie were simply the story of this event, it would be no more than a sad record. What makes it more is the way it shows how racism breeds and feeds, and is taught by father to son.
John Singleton, with Rosewood, proves himself to be a capable and talented director, bringing to life a piece of violent American history that some would have preferred left unremembered.
Rhames' gravity and grace, Voight's pinched anguish as he wills himself to do right, the moving work of actors like Don Cheadle and Esther Rolle do much to redeem this film for human if not historical reality.
