Please enter your birth date to watch this video:
You are not allowed to view this material at this time.
X
12 Years a Slave Image

12 Years a Slave

Release Date:
96
Metascore
 57 reviews
8.0
User Score
 1616 ratings

Watch Now

Buy on
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Expand
Rate Movie
Director: Steve McQueen
Writer: John Ridley Solomon Northup Steve McQueen
Production: Summit Entertainment
Movie Details: In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man living in upstate New York, is
In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man living in upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.
Genre(s): Biography Drama History
MPAA Rating: R
Production: Summit Entertainment
Runtime: 134 min
Home Release Date: Mar 4, 2014
Official Site: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/12yearsaslave/
Countries: USA UK
Language: English
Director: Steve McQueen
Writer: John Ridley Solomon Northup Steve McQueen
Starring:
Now Playing:
Play Sound
Please enter your birth date to watch this video:
You are not allowed to view this material at this time.
  • 12 Years A Slave

    12 Years A Slave

  • 12 Years A Slave: Lupita Nyong'o On Her Character

    12 Years A Slave: Lupita Nyong'...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Michael Fassbender On The Director Steve McQueen

    12 Years A Slave: Michael Fassb...

  • 12 Years A Slave: What'd You Say To Pats?

    12 Years A Slave: What'd You Sa...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Fight Back October 18 (TV Spot)

    12 Years A Slave: Fight Back Oc...

  • 12 Years A Slave: The Team (Featurette)

    12 Years A Slave: The Team (Fea...

  • 12 Years A Slave: I Want To Live

    12 Years A Slave: I Want To Live

  • 12 Years A Slave: Solomon, Let Me Weep

    12 Years A Slave: Solomon, Let ...

  • 12 Years A Slave: A Lusty Visit In The Night

    12 Years A Slave: A Lusty Visit...

  • 12 Years A Slave: The Cast (Featurette)

    12 Years A Slave: The Cast (Fea...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Take Comfort

    12 Years A Slave: Take Comfort

  • 12 Years A Slave: Where You From Platt?

    12 Years A Slave: Where You Fro...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Alfre Woodard On Steve McQueen's Work

    12 Years A Slave: Alfre Woodard...

  • 12 Years a Slave (UK Trailer 2)

    12 Years a Slave (UK Trailer 2)

  • 12 Years a Slave (UK Trailer 1)

    12 Years a Slave (UK Trailer 1)

  • 12 Years A Slave: Legacy (Featurette)

    12 Years A Slave: Legacy (Featu...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Welcome To Washington

    12 Years A Slave: Welcome To Wa...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Soap

    12 Years A Slave: Soap

  • 12 Years A Slave: I Did As Instructed

    12 Years A Slave: I Did As Inst...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Chiwetel Ejiofor On What He Hopes Audiences Can Get Out Of The Film

    12 Years A Slave: Chiwetel Ejio...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Faces (Featurette)

    12 Years A Slave: Faces (Featur...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Paul Dano On Working With Director Steve McQueen

    12 Years A Slave: Paul Dano On ...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Fight Back Now Playing (TV Spot)

    12 Years A Slave: Fight Back No...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Benedict Cumberbatch On His Character

    12 Years A Slave: Benedict Cumb...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Mind Your Wallet

    12 Years A Slave: Mind Your Wallet

  • 12 Years A Slave: Adepero Oduye On Working With Chiwetel Ejiofor

    12 Years A Slave: Adepero Oduye...

  • 12 Years A Slave (Blu-Ray/DVD Trailer)

    12 Years A Slave (Blu-Ray/DVD T...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Director's Vision (Featurette)

    12 Years A Slave: Director's Vi...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Steve McQueen On What Attracted Him To The Project

    12 Years A Slave: Steve McQueen...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Chiwetel Becomes Solomon (Featurette)

    12 Years A Slave: Chiwetel Beco...

  • 12 Years A Slave: A Portrait Of Solomo Northup (Featurette)

    12 Years A Slave: A Portrait Of...

  • 12 Years A Slave: Sarah Paulson On Her Character's Costume

    12 Years A Slave: Sarah Paulson...

Trailers

Rate Movie

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Add your rating

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Spoiler Alert!
0/5000
Critic Reviews
(57)
96
Metascore Universal acclaim
56 Positive Ratings 98%
1 Mixed Ratings 1%
0 Negative Ratings 0%
Based on 57 Critic Reviews View All
100
The Telegraph
Tim Robey | Sep 14, 2013
"Elicits from McQueen a directing job that's compellingly humble but also majestic, because his radical showmanship is turned to such precise, human purposes." ... Read full review
100
CineVue
Joe Walsh | Oct 27, 2016
"With 12 Years a Slave, McQueen has not only created his finest work to date, but also a potential modern masterpiece." ... Read full review
100
The New York Times
Manohla Dargis | Oct 17, 2013
"The genius of 12 Years a Slave is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reaped an enduring, terrible price." ... Read full review
100
Boston Globe
Ty Burr | Oct 24, 2013
"12 Years a Slave is to the “peculiar institution” what “Schindler’s List” was to the Holocaust: a work that, finally, asks a mainstream audience to confront the worst of what humanity can do to itself. If there’s no Oskar Schindler here, that’s partly the point." ... Read full review
100
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle | Oct 31, 2013
"12 Years a Slave has some of the awkwardness and inauthenticity of a foreign-made film about the United States. The dialogue of the Washington, D.C., slave traders sounds as if it were written for "Lord of the Rings." White plantation workers speak in standard redneck cliches. And yet the ways in which this film is true are much more important than the ways it's false." ... Read full review
90
Slate
Dana Stevens | Oct 17, 2013
"It’s the unhappiest happy ending I’ve ever seen, a moment that makes you weep not just for this one man who found his way back to freedom, but for all those men and women who never knew it in the first place." ... Read full review
50
Slant Magazine
Ed Gonzalez | Sep 13, 2013
"Steve McQueen's film practically treats Solomon Norhtup as passive observer to a litany of horrors that exist primarily for our own education." ... Read full review
Critic Reviews
User Reviews
(230)
8.0
User Score Generally favorable reviews
1,384 Positive Ratings 85%
116 Mixed Ratings 7%
116 Negative Ratings 7%
Based on 1616 Ratings and 230 Reviews View All
10
MovieMasterEddy
Apr 6, 2016
‘12 Years a Slave’ Holds Nothing Back in Show of Suffering.

“12 Years a Slave” isn’t the first movie about slavery in the United States —‘12 Years a Slave’ Holds Nothing Back in Show of Suffering.

“12 Years a Slave” isn’t the first movie about slavery in the United States — but it may be the one that finally makes it impossible for American cinema to continue to sell the ugly lies it’s been hawking for more than a century. Written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen, it tells the true story of Solomon Northup, an African-American freeman who, in 1841, was snatched off the streets of Washington, and sold. It’s at once a familiar, utterly strange and deeply American story in which the period trappings long beloved by Hollywood — the paternalistic gentry with their pretty plantations, their genteel manners and all the fiddle-dee-dee rest — are the backdrop for an outrage.

The story opens with Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) already enslaved and cutting sugar cane on a plantation. A series of flashbacks shifts the story to an earlier time, when Solomon, living in New York with his wife and children, accepts a job from a pair of white men to play violin in a circus. Soon the three are enjoying a civilized night out in Washington, sealing their camaraderie with heaping plates of food, flowing wine and the unstated conviction — if only on Solomon’s part — of a shared humanity, a fiction that evaporates when he wakes the next morning shackled and discovers that he’s been sold. Thereafter, he is passed from master to master.

It’s a desperate path and a story that seizes you almost immediately with a visceral force. But Mr. McQueen keeps everything moving so fluidly and efficiently that you’re too busy worrying about Solomon, following him as he travels from auction house to plantation, to linger long in the emotions and ideas that the movie churns up. Part of this is pragmatic — Mr. McQueen wants to keep you in your seat, not force you out of the theater, sobbing — but there’s something else at work here. This is, he insists, a story about Solomon, who may represent an entire subjugated people and, by extension, the peculiar institution, as well as the American past and present. Yet this is also, emphatically, the story of one individual.

Unlike most of the enslaved people whose fate he shared for a dozen years, the real Northup was born into freedom. (His memoir’s telegraphing subtitle is “Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, From a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana.”) That made him an exceptional historical witness, because even while he was inside slavery — physically, psychologically, emotionally — part of him remained intellectually and culturally at a remove, which gives his book a powerful double perspective. In the North, he experienced some of the privileges of whiteness, and while he couldn’t vote, he could enjoy an outing with his family. Even so, he was still a black man in antebellum America.

Mr. McQueen is a British visual artist who made a rough transition to movie directing with his first two features, “Hunger” and “Shame,” both of which were embalmed in self-promoting visuals. “Hunger” is the sort of art film that makes a show of just how perfectly its protagonist, the Irish dissident Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), smears his excrement on a prison wall. “Shame,” about a sex addict (Mr. Fassbender again), was little more than glossy surfaces, canned misery and preening directorial virtuosity. For “12 Years a Slave,” by contrast, Mr. McQueen has largely dispensed with the conventions of art cinema to make something close to a classical narrative; in this movie, the emphasis isn’t on visual style but on Solomon and his unmistakable desire for freedom.

There’s nothing ambivalent about Solomon. Mr. Ejiofor has a round, softly inviting face, and he initially plays the character with the stunned bewilderment of a man who, even chained, can’t believe what is happening to him. Not long after he’s kidnapped, Solomon sits huddled with two other prisoners on a slaver’s boat headed south. One man insists that they should fight their crew. A second disagrees, saying, “Survival’s not about certain death, it’s about keeping your head down.” Seated between them, Solomon shakes his head no. Days earlier he was home. “Now,” he says, “you tell me all is lost?” For him, mere survival cannot be enough. “I want to live.”

The genius of “12 Years a Slave” is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reaped an enduring, terrible price.… Expand
10
greenvelvet
Nov 16, 2013
Filming harrowing memories of Solomon Northup. It really happened. The year is 1841. In the north of the United States for years blacksFilming harrowing memories of Solomon Northup. It really happened. The year is 1841. In the north of the United States for years blacks citizens enjoy freedom. However, in the southern states there is still slavery. Based in Washington, DC Solomon Northup a free and educated black man, father of two children, happy husband and a respected citizen is a trick kidnapped and sold to slave traders. Film Sensational.… Expand
10
LamontRaymond
Oct 18, 2013
Chiwetel Ejiofor is so impressive in this incredibly intense, visceral film. (When it ended, nobody in my theater moved for a period of time,Chiwetel Ejiofor is so impressive in this incredibly intense, visceral film. (When it ended, nobody in my theater moved for a period of time, and there was no round of applause mostly, it seemed, because of the shock of it all. Clapping didn’t seem like the right thing to do.) The fact that we experience the story from the perspective of a kidnapped free man makes the film instantly relatable. I was so happy to have watched all of Tom Fontana’s excellent “Copper” which features an African American civil war veteran doctor living in New York, and all of his family’s struggles in Five Points. Solomon, a New Yorker kidnapped from Washington DC, could be any of us. The Southern landscape as it likely existed in those days provides such a beautiful-yet- eerie backdrop to this movie. What I particularly appreciate the fact that all the shots are confined you never see very far into the distance. There’s never any perspective on things. When the boat transporting the kidnapped south moves, you see the paddlewheels. On the plantations, you see the three or four acres where the slaves live. You never get any aerial shots, which is so effective in giving you a disoriented, lost feel. Even if Solomon wants to escape, he has no idea where the hell he is, and neither do we. The acting in general is uniformly excellent. Fassbender? Wow. Not since Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List has an actor put out so completely for the detestable guy role and to such great effect.… Expand
9
gamingmachinery
Jul 14, 2020
No review present. No review present. No review present. No review present.
8
BKM
Nov 20, 2013
While I don't think that it's quite the masterpiece that it's being hailed as, Steve McQueen's take on one of the darkest chapters in AmericanWhile I don't think that it's quite the masterpiece that it's being hailed as, Steve McQueen's take on one of the darkest chapters in American history is fascinating never the less. The depiction of the horrific lives led by slaves has rarely,if ever, been captured with so much honesty and complexity. The performances are exceptional, particularly Fassbender as the sadistic plantation owner who embodies all of the malice and hatred that allowed such an unspeakable era to forever scar our collective consciousness.… Expand
7
DawdlingPoet
Nov 23, 2021
This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. 12 Years A Slave is a historical drama based on a biography/memoir by the main character of the film, Solomon Northup. It covers themes of freedom, property and ownership, plus dignity in the face of adversity, survival and endurance.

It is, understandably, quite a grim watch - there are scenes which are likely to make most people flinch, in which the various slaves are attacked or, alternatively (but effectively the same thing), tortured for daring to step out of line. Its a very sad fact that such activity was ever considered acceptable by people, people of any colour, ethnicity et al. I was aware of the subject matter before watching the film, so I wasn't especially shocked by the heavy content it contained. I feel its important for films covering such dark periods in societies past to be as realistic as possible and not to sugar coat things. I can't claim to be any kind of specific expert in this area historically but I can say that I believe the film to be certainly closely based on the biography of said Mr. Northup published in the 1800s.

I felt it was a pretty emotive watch as well, for obvious reasons. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Mr. Northup and he does a very good job at portraying his character, seeming quite strong willed, yet also visually seeming upset, angry and frustrated at the relevant points in the plot, as you'd expect. I felt he really helped bring his character to life and it was little surprise to me to discover that he was nominated for an Oscar in the best performance by an actor in a leading role category in 2013. I feel it would be difficult not to feel sorry for Solomon and not to admire his determination to fight for his freedom, to believe he'll be able to regain it again.

Also cast is Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Ford - one of the less violent slave owners. He is slightly more compassionate than others and comes across as a quite thoughtful character. Paul Giamatti plays Freeman, Adepero Oduye plays Eliza, another slave who lives alongside Solomon, Bill Camp plays Radburn and Michael Kenneth Williams plays Robert. As well as this, Michael Fassbender plays Edwin Epps, one of the biggest villains. I found his role to be really quite chilling at times. Oh and then there's a little known (ahem) actor called Brad Pitt, who plays a Canadian who comes to help out at Mr. Northup's slave owners residency and who plays an important part in the plot. He comes across as quite understated in this role.

The music used is quite good at intensifying what are clearly quite traumatic scenes, in heightening the sense of potential impending doom. The music is at times operatic in style, although not always.

Content wise, this film contains some offensive language, including, obviously, some racially offensive language (such as the 'N' word which many African Americans were referred to as at the time, in a perjorative sense). There is also, of course, some moderate violence, including bloody violence and torture scenes, which are quite frightening. As well as this, there are sex references, an implied rape scene (although no explicit nudity is shown) and moments of partial nudity present. Due to this, the film carries a 15 rating. According to what I've read online, the content pretty accurately reflects what we believe to have been carried out at the time (no doubt via the memoirs the film is based on), as sad as this is and as such it isn't regarded as being unnecessarily over-the-top, in a Hollywood/exploitation sort of a sense.

The plot pace felt a bit slow at times but then I suppose its important to convey how difficult it was for people like Mr. Northup, to attempt to abandon his slavery status. It isn't what may be called an enjoyable watch, for pretty obvious reasons but it didn't seem to shy away from things and, as I say, I felt that was somehow admirable. The film has a total running time of two hours and a quarter, so it isn't a short but sweet type of film but then neither should it be, I suppose. I do feel like this is a pretty memorable film. It did feel a little long winded but then scenes which maybe didn't specifically add a lot of context to the plot as such, did help towards building a better sense of character development, so I wouldn't really say that it unnecessarily dragged on. I also noticed (and appreciated) some nice, if but brief, shots of pretty sunsets shown at the end of scenes involving Mr. Northup laboring hard at work all day. You could argue that its showing the beauty in a place of such hard work and physical pain, so its a case of highlighting one extreme and then the other in the same area.

Yes I'd recommend this film as being an emotive watch about one mans struggles being caught up in a dark time in society's past. Chiwetel Ejiofor gives a great performance and while I found it to be an understandably hard watch, I felt it was a good film well made.… Expand
0
Reviewer0815
Dec 27, 2020
Very boring movie. It's been given an oscar for the sake of political correctness. I was like: Hey darling, this movie won an oscar, let'sVery boring movie. It's been given an oscar for the sake of political correctness. I was like: Hey darling, this movie won an oscar, let's watch it. But it was so boring, it has become our new measure of boringness. Also: If you want to force your political doctrine down my throat, at least make a good movie and bnothis crap.… Expand
User Reviews