Ava DuVernay directs this account of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches, centering David Oyelowo's commanding performance as Martin Luther King Jr. as he strategizes with fellow organizers and pressures a reluctant President Lyndon Johnson toward the Voting Rights Act. Rather than a birth-to-death biopic, the film narrows its focus to a single, tense campaign, dramatizing the internal disagreements within the movement as sharply as the external violence from state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Oyelowo's King is measured and strategic rather than saintly, a political tactician as much as an orator. It earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and remains a defining civil rights drama of the 2010s.