Hotel Rwanda

• The film draws what power it has from its performances, particularly from Cheadle, who sublimates himself into the role of a man whose life is built around service to others, and who believes to a fault in the essential goodness of people. Running interference between Tutsis and Hutus, government officials and rebels, he recalls Schindler, but in his docile temperament — worrying, even at the height of the conflict, about maintaining the high standards of the Mille Collines.

• Hotel Rwanda, deeply moving, well acted and convincingly staged as it is, is an example of this traditional kind of movie, at which its Irish writer-director, Terry George, has shown himself highly adept in such pictures as In the Name of the Father and Some Mother’s Son.

• The man is named Paul Rusesabagina, and he is played by Don Cheadle as a man of quiet, steady competence in a time of chaos. This is not the kind of man the camera silhouettes against mountaintops, but the kind of man who knows how things work in the real world, who uses his skills of bribery, flattery, apology and deception to save these lives who have come into his care.

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