Uplifting story about a young girl who's father has died, her mother works to support her and the girl seems alone in the world in many ways. She goes to school in a poor neighborhood that doesn't have all of the resources for her to have the best education possible. One thing that she does have is words. Her intellect and her knowledge for words are great and her school needs help with getting it on the map and they want to use Akeelah to help show that their children at the school need the same advantages other students get. Akeelah wins a spelling bee and then is coached by a man telling her that she needs to learn different words and to be able to break them down and know their origins...Akeelah eventually learns a lot about herself, her family, her neighborhood and she reaches for the stars and doesn't let fear hold her back.I always thought it was just a stupid kids film about a spelling Bee, but I watched it and was rather touched by the message here. No one should let the place they come from or the people around them stop them from dreaming big and trying to do the best they can in life. Life is not written in stone for you when you are born and anyone has the power to rise above.Laurence Fisburne, Angela Bassett, Curtis Armstrong and Keke Palmer do wonderful jobs acting here.This is a good drama and it has some powerful messages. 6/10 stars

This movie is just outstanding, although I'm not an English native speaker, but I really enjoyed that movie so much, and I learned a lot of words also... Akeelah (Keke Palmer) was just amazing and she proved that she's a good actress ! I just remember that scene at the school in the very first competition, when Dr. Larabee (Laurence Fishburne) asked her to pronounce some super tough words and she did it. and also when he taught her how to deconstruct that long Latin word "Soliterraneous"... it was just amazing ! so Akeelah, can you pronounce "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" fast, and tell the definition of it ;)after all, it's really a must see movie, i give it 8/10

...for two reasons: one, it features a lovely, nuanced performance from a young actor, Keke "The Wool Cap" Palmer, who will most definitely be a performer to watch over the next several decades, and two, it reunites Lawrence "The Matrix" Fishburne and Angela "The Score" Bassett in roles decidedly different from those they played in "What's Love Got to Do With It?" Beyond that, I'm sorry to say, "Akeelah and the Bee" is pretty much Movie-of-the-Week manipulative and as formulaic as a WWF match. Clichés and stereotypes abound, and even the ending is straight out of the feel-good "everyone's a winner!" playbook (and don't get me started on the absurdly easy word that pops up for Akeelah to wrap everything up in glorious, pseudo-ironic fashion). Nonetheless, I still give the film props for its positive message, if not its overtly rose-colored glasses. I still prefer "Spellbound" as a spelling bee drama; there's just as much tension rooting for the success of the contestants, and best of all, they're real people.

Overall I think Hollywood chose a good premise, and made a very touching, good movie. But they made too many little mistakes. The character of Akeelah was wonderful. I liked every choice they made for her. But they showed no respect for the audience, because outside of Akeelah, all we got were errors in the spelling bee formats, cliché minor story lines, and some truly horrendous, trite dialogue.I found it was in pretty bad taste to get the real-life moderator of the Scripps Spelling Bee but then not show the bee accurately. Basically every part of the movie had flaws to it. Some people will call them little things, but to me they pretty much ruined the movie.If only they cared about making a good movie instead of a Hollywood movie, then this might have been great.