This epic focuses on the historic voting-rights march from Selma, Alabama to the capital, Montgomery, in 1965 and the events that led to it. Selma, as an episode of Martin Luther King’s life, provides the opportunity to develop his story through a political and psychological analysis of King the public figure, and King the man. The story shows the role of politics, showmanship and media manipulation in enacting change. The march from Selma ended with President Johnson (Wilkinson) signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and as such was one of the major milestones of the civil rights movement that changed history forever.

The movie takes us back to the sixties when towns like Selma were unsafe for black Americans and where any attempt to change the order of things and encourage general political participation was not only strongly discouraged, but often punished.

This well staged movie was directed by Ava DuVernays, written by Paul Webb and co -produced by Oprah Winfrey. The movie was shot in Selma itself. This and the use of real news stories from the ’60s reinforce graphically the story’s veracity. The scene in which King gives his speech “How Long, Not Long” mixes re-enactments and news footage.

David Oyelowo plays the role of Martin Luther King with majesty and grace.

In today’s context, as racial violence in the US seems to continue, the movie is not just a historical recreation but also part of an on-going story about justice which is still unfolding.

I can understand some of the lacklustre reviews. This was the first fully English-language feature from Susanne Bier (probably Denmark’s finest director; the most recent film of hers we’ve screened is In a Better World, which won the foreign language Oscar). It re-pairs Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper (previously seen together in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle). And, although the film is not the masterpiece you might expect from this director and cast, it deserved a better reception than it got. Bier quietly but surely conveys the atmosphere of a specific place (Depression-era rural North Carolina – except those forlornly beautiful woods were actually shot in Europe) and also pulls off the tricky feat of getting us interested in and caring about characters we don’t want to see succeed.

George (Cooper) is a timber baron who falls in love with and quickly marries Serena (Lawrence) – attracted in equal parts by her beauty, her troubled past, and the fact that she may be the only woman in the world who knows more than he does about the timber business. What’s more, she is every bit as unburdened as he is by any sense of ethics. Indeed, more so. It slowly becomes apparent that George has married a kind of Lady Macbeth. It’s a tribute to Lawrence’s performance that Serena’s more bizarre behaviour towards the end of the film doesn’t feel like something new – we feel we’re seeing in clearer detail weaknesses that were really there all along.