SOURCE: Kauffmann, Stanley. “Of Human Bondage.” New Republic 217, no. 25 (22 December 1997): 24-5.

In the following review, Kauffmann lauds Amistad as a “solid” and “engrossing” film.

Uniquely, attractively, Steven Spielberg's career is scored with deep changes of intent. Mostly he has worked in the realm of popular pictures, sweeping the world with success after success by realizing juvenile fantasies with a mature talent. But sometimes he employs that talent on mature subjects. The Color Purple, to some degree, grasped troubling matters in black American society. Schindler's List, to the gratifying surprise of many of us, dramatized monumentally the mystery of good in the midst of the mystery of evil. Now Spielberg presents a film out of nineteenth-century American history that again demonstrates his extraordinary gifts.

Amistad (Dream Works) tells a story so significant that its relative obscurity up to now is hard to understand. (After famine, a feast: an opera...