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Selma has a 99% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with good reason: it's an exceptional movie, powerfully written and featuring some extraordinary performances. David Oyelowo is astonishing as Martin Luther King Jr in this tale set around the famous Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery in the early 1960s.
Selma isn't interested in making feel-good history. We tend to forget it now, but at the time of the Civil Rights March many Americans were opposed to progress: in 1963 a Gallup poll found that 78% of white people said they would move house if Black families became their neighbors; some 60% of Americans had an "unfavorable" view of MLK's march on Washington.
Bravery is a word often used too freely today, but the Civil Rights Marchers of the 1960s were incredibly brave – and MLK was all too aware of what he was asking his fellow marchers to do. That makes Selma a kind of war movie. As The New Yorker put it, "it's a movie about history and the creation of history".
The first major movie about a heroic campaigner
In some ways, Selma is "beyond criticism", said the London Evening Standard: it was the first ever major movie "about this heroic campaigner". It's flawed in some respects – reviewer David Sexton felt it was a little too overwhelmed by the importance of its subject – but David Oyelowo "is tremendous in the part, much more plausible as an inspired and charismatic leader than Idris Elba was as Mandela, always compelling your attention, delivering the big speeches with real power and authority, without ever simplifying King or giving him too easy a charm."
Writing in AARP's Movies for Grownups, Meg Grant said that director Ava DuVernay and writer Paul Webb "ambitiously dramatize all the intricacies, detours and compromises a wide-scale social justice movement entails, shining stark light on backroom deals, FBI schemes and even rivalries among various pockets of grass-roots rebellion".
Dwight Brown of the National Newspaper Publishers Association says that "David Oyelowo was born for the role. He looks like Martin, especially after adding a few pounds to his frame, a pencil mustache and razor haircut. The voice. The movements. The oratory skills. It’s as if MLK entered his soul." And the best Netflix movie "teaches us that when we strive, things change. MLK knew that better than anyone."
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