Movie Review: SELMA (2015) AA and B-

SELMA could have been a great movie. It tells the universal story of man's struggle for basic human rights and the courage and tenacity of people who played a part of this major struggle in the history of  the United States.  In my view, LINCOLN produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day Lewis met that test of a great movie.

The AA rating is because the content of the story is about an extremely important part of American history.  The B- rating is because the drama and the vast dimension of the civil rights struggles never came through in the screenplay, acting or in the cinematography. I wonder whether I would have understood the interplay of the political players if I didn't know the history beforehand.

From Rotten Tomatoes:

SELMA is the story of a movement. The film chronicles the tumultuous three-month period in 1965, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent opposition. The epic march from Selma to Montgomery culminated in President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant victories for the civil rights movement.  SELMA tells the real story of how the revered leader and visionary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his brothers and sisters in the movement prompted change that forever altered history.

PS. The Conservative Roberts Court recently negated a portion of the Civil Rights Act.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html