With the commercial success of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper over its release weekend, not only is there a chance you saw it, but there’s a chance you might want to check something else out. With its polarizing reviews and controversy, not only over its Oscar Nominations but also its accuracy of its portrayal of the war and the protagonist’s story, you may be swayed to see a different film. Two films getting high praise but still staying low-key are A Most Violent Year and Selma. Despite Selma receiving two oscar nominations, it’s still not breaking records and isn’t sought out as a go to movie. The film A Most Violent Year as well came out on the last day of 2014, and was forgotten by most oscar voters who didn’t decide to acknowledge it with Academy Award nominations. These are unfortunate cases of films not being recognized as much as they should, and are in a mostly limited release at the moment. Which is deserved of the two because they’re great.

To start with the more well known and talked about, Selma is directed by Ava DuVernay, a former film publicist turned director, who had directed the 2012 Sundance hit Middle of Nowhere which won her the US Directing Award for Dramatic Film at Sundance. The film stars actor David Oyelowo, who had worked with her in Middle of Nowhere, and has been in things from The Last King of Scotland to Rise of the Planet of the Apes to Interstellar. The film has a full ensemble cast of stars and rising actors alike, and gets almost every focus of each supporting actor like Oprah Winfrey, Common, Tom Wilkinson, Keith Stanfield, Carmen Ejogo and many more that are involved in this great cast.

The film succeeded in not only focusing on the historical info, but focuses on the more human side regularly forgotten in a lot of biopics. A lot of times you forgot the story was focusing on the man Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the man you’ve heard of and seen in many pictures and textbooks. The script by Paul Webb focused a lot on blending together all of these historical figures and names, with DuVernay coming in to help give it a side of humanity, where you didn’t need or care to know the backgrounds of these famous figures. In a category of films that focus too hard on attempting to show one persons life instead of one focused and changing moment in said persons life, it becomes more cinematic instead of a biography on the person.

David Oyelowo delivers a performance in this film that is powerful, nuanced and very grounded. When he walks into a room, or you see him in a crowd you can feel the power Dr. King holds within this film. The speeches delivered throughout are on a Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch level of incredible, and he has multiple ones to deliver and shines in everyone. He can then go from this to him at home speaking to his wife, where we see the vulnerable side of this powerful and influential man. It’s a side to this character that you couldn’t expect, and takes this character into corners you wouldn’t expect of a film based on such a famous figure. Oyelowo has a talent of portraying emotions and feelings and intentions without explicitly saying what’s happening. You can feel what’s going on in his mind and can understand what he feels about a topic just by his actions. As the first ever film portrayal of Dr. King in a biopic about him, this is an incredible start, and not only for this, but is a performance that will go down as one of the best in recent memory.

Switching gears to a film based in the past and one that isn’t inspired by a book or a true story, A Most Violent Year is a film that focuses on an immigrant running a heating oil company in 1981 New York with his wife. They have to work through the difficulties of being put under suspicion by the D.A., attempting to buy out new land to expand their business, and stop violent attacks on their trucks in the cities most violent year on record.

This is Writer and Director J.C. Chandor’s third film, after his oscar nominated Margin Call, and film with only Robert Redford All is Lost, he’s a man who’s making interesting and polarizing decisions that don’t follow the common mold of regular films today. The film isn’t violent like a Tarantino film would be violent, it focuses more on character and behavior in this violent scenario. Theres a strung out tension throughout the film, that anyone could be attacked, a hijacking of a truck could take place, and it doesn’t stop at the end of the film. You can feel the tension of this dangerous city, and how hard it is to succeed in a good and clean way during this time.

The two lead performances by Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain are compelling and deep. Both can be seen in certain ways as the heroes, but can sway towards a more violent of evil approach. The film tests their characters morals, and they fight and discuss not only as business partners but as a husband and wife how they will go ahead with their decisions. Oscar Isaac fills the performance with subconscious decisions and behaviors that make you understand this mans life. You can hear his accent disappear and reappear in different settings, to attempt to show the difficulty of putting on an “Americanized” appearance while trying to grow his company. Chastain then comes in a becomes the true power in a lot of scenes, where she may become the one who’s seen as the one who’s just standing there going to a meeting, but then will walk in wearing her all Armani clothes and take charge of everyone in the room. Supporting roles are filled with Selma star David Oyelowo, Albert Brooks, Elyes Gabel and more.

These two films are bonded in many ways, with its actors, cinematographer, genre, but in ways that people see as most important its tacklings of issues of race and ethnicity. Selma clearly shows it, due to it being a bio pic on arguably the most famous and important figure in civil rights in America. It also was directed by a black woman, in an industry that is filled with white men, and continues to prove again and again how gender and race doesn’t affect the talent of a director, but that having people like DuVernay out there making films gets a side and a point of view that is different from a white males perspective, and can get films released with a different approach film going audiences haven’t seen before. A Most Violent Year, which is directed by a white man, shows race groups and ethnicity groups not to be characterized by their race, they are characters and people in this world that exist and happen to be Latino, Black, Hasidic, and the only main white person who is an antagonist is a woman. They go in a way of showing different people who have been rarely represented on film other than being an extra, a criminal, or a problem to the story. You can say that the Academy has a race issue that they didn’t decide to recognize these films, but there are many other issues within for these two films specifically. Both didn’t get enough attention and release time for most of the academy to know about them and they’re not directed by big names. Of course it comes into play, but we can be more to blame as the audience for this. We decide to go see the Clint Eastwood film about a white male with a cast filled with white men, and don’t break records with a black man, directed by a black woman, or a film with a latino male and a white woman as the two leads. We have to accept the responsibility to pay for these films and tell film companies that we want and can see films like these. Then with more attention they can get more support and recognition.