12 Years A Slave: Don't Miss This Flick

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Soloman Northup

Finally, a year after Quentin Tarantino's despicable "Django," a movie has come to the multiplex that takes on our nation's most sinful era with appropriate anger, intelligence and despair.

Soloman Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was a free man living in the north before the Civil War. In this based-on-a-true story, he is kidnapped and enslaved for more than a decade. Not every plantation owner in this painful-to-watch film is a brutal tyrant, but the tragic reality is that the system does not allow for treating slaves as humans.

Northup's war is an interior one. He must fight for his life and his dignity and live on an ever fading  dream of being reunited with his wife and children.

The movie is full of excellent performances by Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Brad Pitt, and others. But this movie belongs to Ejiofor, who was the amazing drag queen, Lola, in the movie "Kinky Boots," a fact that testifies to the tremendous range of this brilliant British actor.

That buzz you hear as you file silently out of the theater is all about Oscar.