12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael K. Williams (2014) Rated R Maybe it had to take a British filmmaker to depict clearly the United States' greatest failing: the horrors of centuries of slavery. In 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup ... is a free man living in New York until he's kidnapped and sold in Louisiana as a slave. He's owned by masters relatively kind ... and harrowingly brutal ... but even under the best conditions, the movie never loses sight of Northup's condition as property, that his well-being and very life are at the whim of his owners. There's no hype here, nor any hemming or hawing; each scene is captured simply but vividly, letting the cruel facts of life in the pre-Civil War era speak for themselves... --Bret Fetzer