One of my all time favorites.

Don't listen to the negative reviews

As Good As It Gets

Admirable film.

bitter, cruel, realistic. not exactly a manifesto. just a picture. not portrait of a hero. only drawing of a kind of Don Quijote and part of an African country tragedy. a film about basic values. about hope and need of change. about a world. and about a sacrifice out of eulogies. the real honest review in this case is silence. because the reality of Africa remains for many of us - Europeans or Americans - not very clear. shadows, hypotheses, silhouettes, legends - that is the heart of our knowledge about this subject. and the difficulty to understand has cause the present. the globalization is not different by the vision of USA or Belgium about Congo in 1960. the manipulation is stronger. and Africa may be the name of Balkans or South America. so, this film is only skin of real events. a skin like a map after a strange hunting.

In the film, Lumumba, we see the faces behind the monumental shift in the Congo's history after it is reclaimed from the Belgians, and we see the motives behind those men into whose hands the raped and starving country fell. Lumumba is not a movie for the hyper masses; it demands the attention of its viewers with raw, truthful acting and intricate, packed dialogue. Little of the main plot is shown through action, it relies almost solely on words, but there is a recurring strand that is only action, and it is the stroke of genius that makes the film an enlightening and powerful panorama of the tense political struggle that the Congo's independence gave birth to. This film is real. It is raw inits depiction of those in power, and those on the streets. It is eye-opening in its content. And it is moving in the passions and emotions of its superbly portrayed characters. Whether you are a history fan, a film buff, or simply like good stories, Lumumba is a must-see.

This is a pretty good film about the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of what was formerly the Belgian Congo. It was done on a small budget and lacks certain production values but it was well presented and the acting sufficient to tell the story.Many people have complained in other reviews about the angle from which it was directed and whether the story is accurate or not. I'm not an expert on Congolese history, so cannot offer an opinion on that score, but it's obviously a complex situation and not easily covered in a two hour film.The Belgian Congo was an important battleground in the Cold War right around the time of the transition to the Kennedy administration, and no doubt the United States had a hand in Lumumba's execution. He was, after all, a nationalist outside of the American sphere of control and was flirting with the Russians (much as Fidel Castro was doing across the Atlantic in Cuba).But there is much more to the story. Prime Minister Lumumba wanted to unite the Congo and control it with a central government, but there were regional powers and economic forces working against him. I suppose anyone trying to do what Lumumba was aiming to do would have been at risk at that time and place. Even now, over four decades later, with Mobutu Seko gone, there is much civil strife and no one has united the country.Raoul Peck, a Haitian who has lived in Zaire, does a fair job of directing this story. He presents Lumumba in a heroic light but also shows the flaws in his leadership. His life isn't overly dramatized like what Spike Lee did to Malcolm X, and, thankfully, he didn't take the Oliver Stone approach and make it into a big international conspiracy. It's history lite, but seeing as how this is a subject not covered very often, it's valuable nonetheless.

To answer the question of a previous reviewer who asked the name of the U.S. official mentioned in "Lumumba", the name of the character is "Mr. Carlucci." Frank Carlucci is reported as having been at that time Second Secretary at the U.S. Embassy in the Congo. Subsequently, among other assignments, he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Portugal, Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Secretary of Defense, and is now the Chairman of the Carlyle Group. It's hardly surprising that Carlucci's biographical sketch on his www.carlylegroup.com web site fails to credit his service in the Belgian Congo. If his name was deliberately censored from the HBO version of "Lumumba" it may have been to avoid the possibility of HBO's being sued in U.S. courts. Carlucci's name, however, is clearly mentioned in the theatre version of "Lumumba" that I saw recently. In the event, I expect that he would deny any involvement in Lumumba's murder.Others have commented on the evenhandedness with which the film "Lumumba" treats the parties concerned: Lumumba-supporters, other Congolese, even Belgians. A somewhat more sinister view emerges, I think, from the BBC documentary entitled "Who Killed Lumumba?", based on the book "The Murder of Lumumba" by Belgian historian Ludo de Witte. When examined closely, these films demonstrate that the fate of Lumumba and the history of the Congo is not just a matter of black and white. Only Lumumba's murderers believe that.