SOURCE: Guerrero, Ed. Review of Rosewood, by John Singleton. Cineaste 23, no. 1 (1997): 45–47.

In the following review, Guerrero offers a positive assessment of Rosewood, complimenting the film for exploring the “collective, national psyche.”

John Singleton's Rosewood grapples with a powerful, daunting contradiction. Put simply, how does one make a slick, Hollywood action-adventure-entertainment flick, with big box-office expectations, about one of history's ultimate nightmares: genocidal racism? Singleton is not alone in attempting to negotiate this contradiction, since other mainstream filmmakers have attempted to do so before. Posed as question, this contradiction reverberates with a number of issues, raised most recently by the work of Steven Spielberg in Schindler's List (1993), Mario and Melvin Van Peebles in Panther (1995), Costa-Gavras in Betrayed (1988), and even Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves (1990).

Singleton answers the challenge of his material by casting this true and horrific tale in the mold of the Hollywood revisionist Western, with its...