The hollow Emancipation is a mismatch between director and subject.

| Mar 16, 2023

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.

| Dec 13, 2022

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.

| Dec 13, 2022

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

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 10, 2022

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

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 10, 2022

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.

| Dec 10, 2022

It's a fantasy that can't match the power of the photograph from which it's derived.

| Original Score: C | Dec 9, 2022

After the infamous slap that sidelined his career, Will Smith returns as a runaway slave in a sorry but noble misfire that offers the disgraced actor pitifully few chances to bring dimension to a script that traps in a swamp of misery-porn cliches.

| Dec 9, 2022

Had “Emancipation” shaken off its Oscar-baiting “slave movie” shackles and instead gone full-tilt into a vengeance-laden “freedom movie,” it might have worked.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 9, 2022

If you like your Civil War films light on historicity but awash in alligator knife fights, then Emancipation is the movie for you.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 8, 2022

In an attempt to mold itself into the shape of movies like The Great Escape or The Defiant Ones, the makers of this film have resigned the horrors of slavery to a gimmick. That’s a bad choice. A miscalculation.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 8, 2022

The problem with Smith isn’t his presence. It’s what the film does with it. The script leaves Peter a cipher, unimagined beyond the demands of the plot: suffer, fight alligators, seek a reunion with a family written as stick figures.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 8, 2022

It mainly works, due to a quietly powerful performance from Will Smith as an enslaved man just trying to get home.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 8, 2022

The film constantly shifts its aim from moment to moment, with only one Smith’s presence left to anchor the goings on at any one given second. But that is a mighty impressive presence to have.

| Dec 8, 2022

For all its harrowing moments, “Emancipation” is best judged as a piece of entertainment, and on that point it just about succeeds.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 8, 2022

The movie exists between prestige and genre (or two genres, really, as it morphs in its final third from an escaped fugitive picture to a war movie), yet it can’t quite grasp either the elevated emotion of prestige or the snap of the genre.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 8, 2022

[Antoine Fuqua] and screenwriter William N. Collage seem caught between noble intentions and their baser entertainment instincts...

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 7, 2022

If you know the history of “Emancipation” at all, the pursuit here is without suspense, and Smith’s aura of grandiose rectitude doesn’t help.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Dec 7, 2022

A mostly affecting, no-holds-barred look at degradation, inhumanity and, ultimately, inspiration.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2022

A Will Smith vanity project that pales next to more accomplished films about Black suffering that better remind us of our nation’s ongoing shame.

| Original Score: C | Dec 5, 2022