| Paramount Pictures | Release Date: December 25, 2014 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
46
Mixed:
5
Negative:
1
|
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Critic Reviews
Perhaps not surprisingly, Selma seems to understand King best when he's behind a podium or at the head of a march. After all, that public Martin Luther King, Jr. is the one engrained in our collective memory, representing the kind of person we all should be so lucky to aspire to be.
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At its best, Ava DuVernay’s biographical film honors Dr. King’s legacy by dramatizing the racist brutality that spurred him and his colleagues to action. The director and her screenwriter, Paul Webb, are less successful — sometimes much less so — at breathing life into the private moments that define King as an inspirational figure with human flaws, and a political as well as spiritual force.
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As well done as much of Selma is, it periodically falls from grace with moments that are either emotionally flat or excessively agitprop in nature. Consistently the most ineffective scenes are those that involve powerful but obstructionist white people, especially the unhelpful trio of Johnson, Alabama Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth) and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker). The deftness with acting and character that can be this film’s strength simply deserts it here.
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