This last weekend, I finally saw ’12 Years a Slave.’ It was the most powerful movie I’ve ever seen in my life, an event so gripping and terrifying that, when I went to bed ten hours later — it was a morning matinee — I lay awake for five hours turning it over in my mind before I could fall asleep. I understand it not merely as the greatest film about slavery ever made, as it has been widely hailed, but a film more broadly about race. Its sublimated themes, as I understand them, identify the core social and political fissures that define the American racial divide to this day. To identify ’12 Years a Slave’ as merely a story about slavery is to miss what makes race the furious and often pathological subtext of American politics in the Obama era.
— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.
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