dvd of the week
The events in Selma, Ala., a town with a majority of black residents only 2 percent of whom could vote, helped force the Voting Rights Act into existence. One of 2014’s best films, Selma is about how that happened. Director Ana DuVernay’s work on Selma is tremendous, and it announces a major American filmmaker. Her recreations of well documented events are flawless, but so are her quieter, mostly fictionalized, scenes, such as those between Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) and his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) and between black maid Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) and Selma’s hideous voter registrar. The performances she pulled from her cast, in particular Ejogo, Winfrey and Oyelowo, are roundly wonderful. What the amazing Oyelowo does as King is to make a legendary and iconic hero into a man – a great, flawed, human man.
