Amazing Grace (PG) Catch a Fire (12A)

Two hundred years after the British slave trade was outlawed, Amazing Grace pays tribute to one of the men who did the outlawing. It opens in 1797 with a laudanum- glugging William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) worn out by repeated failed efforts to push his abolitionist Bill through Parliament. Retiring to Bath, he meets Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai), who's eager to hear about his campaign, whereupon the film flashes back to the days when, as a country squire, he was convinced by activists, including Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell), to take up the cause of the slaves. We also meet his friend William Pitt (Benedict Cumberbatch), and his priest, John Newton (Albert Finney), a reformed slaver who wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace". Spooner's feisty support and heaving bosom galvanise Wilberforce to quit the laudanum and go back into battle.

Watching Michael Apted's film is rather like being given an informative tour of a museum by a guide in period costume. There are sheaves of statistics, anecdotes and quotations, as well as a few jokes to brighten up the history lesson, but there's too much telling and not enough showing. The most cinematic scene has Wilberforce standing on a table in his gentleman's club, while most of the drama concerns his wavering health, as represented by the varying thicknesses of make-up around Gruffudd's eyes. There's one freed slave, Olaudah Equiano (Youssou N'Dour), who describes to Wilberforce how awful his experiences were, but "describes" is the operative word. Without any sequences in Africa or the West Indies or onboard a cramped slave ship, Amazing Grace might as well have been a radio play.

A comparably worthy but ponderous political biopic, Catch a Fire recounts the story of Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), a conformist black South African who splits his time between working as a foreman at the Secunda oil refinery, coaching a boys' football team and looking after his wife and daughters. But when a bomb goes off in the refinery in 1980, Chamusso is arrested and his Afrikaner interrogator, Nic Vos (Tim Robbins), is so vicious that Chamusso commences training with the military wing of the ANC as soon as he's released. There's some contemporary resonance to the theme of a man being radicalised by the very forces which are intent on repressing that radicalism, but Catch a Fire is too superficial to be very stimulating. Luke is as blank as a committed rebel as he is as a company man, and although Vos is humanised by his family and his acoustic guitar, Robbins plays him as a cold-eyed, cold-hearted fascist. Their duel doesn't catch fire.

n.barber@independent.co.uk