Marley

Directed by Kevin Macdonald

(PG-13)

***

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This “riveting” Bob Marley biopic is “far from a hagiography,” said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. It’s instead a detailed character study that acknowledges its subject’s flaws while making the case that Marley’s life and music were defined by his desire to reconcile his divided racial inheritance. The movie is “visually exhilarating” from the moment the camera descends on Marley’s birthplace, a poor village in Jamaica’s hills, said Steve Morse in The Boston Globe. Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) shows us how an outcast—born to a black mother and a white father he barely knew—found redemption in music. But Macdonald is “a hard-nosed filmmaker,” so he’s also “ruthlessly honest” in capturing the pain caused by Marley’s womanizing and stubborn, demanding nature. Dominated by interviews with those who knew the late reggae star, this “leisurely paced” film proves exemplary in all ways but one, said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. Marley’s music “tends to be heard in frustratingly brief bursts”; only during the final credits are we allowed a full sense of his songs’ enduring power and global reach.