Rating of
3.5/4
Not 2014's 12 Years A Slave but still good.
Indyfreak - wrote on 05/16/15
Ava DuVernay's Oscar contender 'Selma' is a powerfully acted and beautifully filmed historical drama highlighting the good, the bad, and the ugly side of American racial politics. For a PG-13 rated movie, it's surprisingly gruesome in its depiction of the racial violence and sometimes jarring to Martin Luther King's popular image with the constant political maneuvering that King had to endure during the Selma march, sometimes to his personal expense. The cast is large and the major players give good performances but there are so many characters and so much ground to cover that it is confusing at times. It does not help that the pacing is slower than it should be but its effective storytelling capabilities really assist to drive home the point. More importantly, 'Selma' maintains a sense of timeliness with the #Black Lives Matter movement and the degradation of voting rights across the country.
