50 Shades of Grey (18)
Given that EL James's first novel originally started life as a piece of Twilight fan fiction, it should perhaps have come as no surprise that 50 Shades plays like a Twilight movie, with some x-rated sex replacing the pale faces and fangs.
As the many people who read the book will know, Grey is a millionaire businessman who comes in the not unappealing shape here of Irish actor Jamie Dornan.
Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), a young student sent to interview him, is instantly smitten and the heat is reciprocated.
But it emerges he’s heavily into unusually dominant behaviour in the bedroom and the old romantic even wants her to sign a contract confirming what he can and can’t do to her. Will Ana submit to his desires, and if so to what extent?
I had expected a variety of responses to Spring’s most anticipated blockbuster, but being bored was not one of them.
It's all about the sex of course, and the couple do share a decent onscreen chemistry, while the action in the S&M den manages to be both erotic and tastefully put together - that is, until one uncomfortable scene towards the end. To be fair, this scene is intended to be dark.
Though director Sam Taylor-Johnson and writer Kelly Marcel have done an adequate job of adapting James’s famously cheesy novel for the big screen, the dialogue is painfully poor at times.
Thankfully, some of the worst elements of the book are left out altogether. The awful “goddess” dialogue doesn’t make the cut, nor does THAT tampon scene.
Of all involved, the person who comes out best from the movie is Johnson. She shows she can act and her Ana attempts to give this aloof movie its emotional core, though ultimately there is simply not enough story here to work with.
Selma (12A)
Shamefully overlooked in this year’s Oscar nominations, the real strength in Ava DuVernay’s film - besides its perfect central performance - is that it centres on how one town became the central focus for the civil rights movement.
The movie chronicles a three-month period in the dangerous campaign spearheaded by Dr Martin Luther King in 1965; the US has said a reluctant yes to equal voting rights for black people, but in the South, the transition is anything but smooth.
The vast majority of blacks are still effectively denied voting rights amid vicious resistance, bureaucracy and even violence at the hands of certain sections of the white population.
Sensing a mood of change, but with President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) reluctant to provoke unrest by enforcing federal law, King and his supporters take to the town of Selma, Alabama, intent on marching to the state-capital Montgomery and forcing public attention.
The movement chose to focus its efforts in Selma partly because they anticipated that the brutality of local sheriff Jim Clark towards black people would win them the support of neutrals.
And the film charts how this strategic decision came at a huge personal risk and cost to King and many of those who marched with him. Actor David Oyelowo, so good in last month's A Most Violent Year, is terrific as King and deserves more attention than he's getting this awards season.
