Critics reviews

It's about the ingenuity of a filmmaker tasked with constructing a public figure without access to his words. DuVernay, Director of Photography Bradford Young and actor David Oyelowo produce a vision of King that modern audiences can understand... He trembles with the regret that he couldn't have saved one more life. This film and its warm images of King act as his backbone when his heart won't talk to him.

The icon biopic is a tricky genre to nail: unexamined reverence leads to inertia, but so can over-exhaustive academic scrutiny. Ava DuVernay's Martin Luther King portrait, Selma (Fox, 12), however, gets the balance vibrantly, vitally right. Though it's unabashedly in thrall to the slain civil rights leader, it avoids hagiography via its rigorous focus on the intricacies of democratic process.

Though Selma languished in development hell for years, it's nearly impossible to watch it now outside the context of current events. Sequences of police meeting fiery but controlled gatherings with tear gas and beatings called to mind Ferguson upon the film's theatrical release, and Selma reaches Blu-ray in time for them to conjure Baltimore. Nonetheless, the film's relevance owes more to the enduring lessons it offers about organizing social protest in the modern era...

Selma is intelligent, and certainly well-meaning – but it's a history lesson rather than a movie (at one point, the plot stops so that characters can explain the concept of "voting vouchers" to each other), and of course a comfy wallow in Our Common Victory against the racists.

A film based on a historical subject, even a beautifully shot one, can remind us without meaning to that although reading in the US is a minority activity, the book is still the only medium in which you can make a complicated argument.

There is a beautiful consistency to Oyelowo's performance, especially in the delicate tonal overlap between King's private and public personas. Part of the film's potency derives from the fact that DuVernay, Oyelowo and co-writer Paul Webb opt against making King the subject of the film, instead placing him as a guiding figure whose decisions exert a profound effect on history. Discourse is the subject. Obligation in the subject. Selma is the subject.

Throughout, DuVernay composes with a clean, classical style, but she films the many scenes of crowd violence with an unflinching eye. The trio of fraught showdowns on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, meanwhile, are beautifully shot and choreographed, charged with a palpable energy that marries the mythical and cinematic with a powerful sense of reality.

As it stands, Selma strikes me as a work of considerable aesthetic and moral force, though hamstrung by glaring flaws in casting. In fact, it does have an LBJ problem, and that problem's name is Tom Wilkinson, who plays the 36th President of the United States. I never thought I'd be nostalgic for Liev Schreiber's President Johnson, seen playing statesman from the toilet in 2013's The Butler, but Wilkinson's jowl-shaking very nearly did it.

Selma is not just a movie about getting a job done, it's about thinking things through, and it very often depicts its characters thinking things through. There's nothing to which Old Hollywood is more hostile than actual thought, except maybe its cinematic depiction.

The movie gets what made the civil rights movement such a seismic success: clashing titans — on the movement's front lines, in the White House, and in the governor's mansion. The stakes in Selma feel astronomical, and you feel the pressure and force — the dynamics — exerted between participants on each side.

The faux tension [between King and LBJ] has obviously been inserted into the movie in order to make it more "dramatic" and add "buzz," but in doing so, the makers of Selma have taken prohibitive liberties with the truth. So much of Selma is fine and true and important—especially when it comes to the famous marches in 1965—that there need not have been gratuitous exploitation of a major set of events in our history, or deliberately misleading the public.

Shifting perspective between multiple characters, screenwriter Paul Webb invites us to consider the events in the context of media culture and federal politics as well as black historical experience; by contrast, director Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere) avoids "big picture" thinking, staging many principal scenes as chamber drama. This is lucid in its political analysis and sobering in its depictions of racially motivated violence, though it sometimes comes off as stolid.