Despite its Best Picture nomination, **Selma **is currently billed as the Film The Oscars Forgot. But don't let that Academy Awards snub and its ensuing fallout, likely to linger into a second week, dampen your anticipation. Ava DuVernay's account of Martin Luther King's march in Selma, Alabama in March 1965 features a powerhouse turn from David Oyelowo and has plenty else to commend it. It also boasts four new UK posters, timed to commemorate Martin Luther King Day. Click below for a closer look.
Rather than a broader biopic of King, DuVernay's script homes in on a single, seminal moment in the Civil Rights movement: the march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama, to demand that black men and women be properly enfranchised in the democratic process. The right to vote, hitherto denied them via all manner of backhanded expedients by Southern courts, was King's key goal, but as the film explores and Oyelowo brilliantly depicts, achieving it required the adroitness of a politician and the sublety of a chess grandmaster.
Oprah Winfrey, Common, Giovanni Ribisi, Carmen Ejogo, Dylan Baker, Wendell Pierce and Cuba Gooding Jr. are also part of the cast, and Christian Coulson (Slumdog Millionaire) and Brad PItt (via his Plan B production company) are among the producers. **
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**Selma **opened to solid, if unspectacular, box office in the US over Christmas. It'll make its bow in UK cinemas on February 6, but you can catch it at selected Cineworld and Picturehouse cinemas tonight, timed for MLK Day.