Among the movies opening today ...

In 1797, William Wilberforce was a young abolitionist firebrand MP working the front and back rooms of British politics -- with his close friend William Pitt -- to abolish slavery in the Empire.

Wilberforce was 21 when elected to the House of Commons. Pitt became the youngest prime minister in England's history at the incredible age of 24.

"Amazing Grace" (), a sumptuous period piece chronicling their struggle, stars Ioan Gruffudd as Wilberforce and Benedict Cumberbatch as Pitt. Pitted against them are the odious likes of Lord Tarlton (Ciaran Hinds) and the Duke of Clarence (Toby Jones of "Infamous" Truman Capote fame). Director Michael Apted guides and capably captures their characters while integrating the main abolition story with such other little events as the American and French revolutions.

Gruffudd is terrific as the eloquent, stoop-shouldered MP with physical weakness but spiritual strength. Mesmerizing in his scant three scenes is Albert Finney as blind John Newton, the slave trader-turned-evangelical-minister, who wrote a simple song to help Wilberforce resolve his vocational crisis of conscience: religion vs. politics.

"Do you intend to use your beautiful voice to praise the Lord or change the world?" Pitt asks.

Wilberforce, eventually and humbly, decides to do both.

"Amazing Grace" is heavy-handed and bathetic at times, and Equiano (Youssou N'Dour) is its only black character with more than a line or two. Indeed, it tends to relegate Africans to objects of pity or tangential pawns in an epic but simplistic white folks' struggle between absolute good and evil -- "morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake," in the words of one critic. It's not terribly subtle.

Such is the hazard of historical melodrama in general, and this one, in particular, has a decidedly BBC feel. It opens today on the bicentennial of the first abolitionist bill's passage in Parliament. But the full Slavery Abolition Act wasn't passed until decades later, in 1833, a month after Wilberforce's death.

Timelines and subtleties aside, "Amazing Grace" is as emotionally powerful as its namesake song: "I once was lost but now I'm found, was blind but now I see."

Rated PG for thematic material and some mild language.

-- Post-Gazette film critic Barry Paris

'Reno 911!: Miami'

Comedy has always rewarded those willing to risk all and make themselves look incredibly stupid, a concept that has escalated to an utterly fearless streak running through comic movies these days. Comics, from Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat to the "Jackass" gang, are taking one for the team, and for low, low laughs.

"Reno 911!," the Comedy Central TV show, becomes "Reno 911!: Miami" in a movie that positions the troupe who star in it somewhere between "Jackass" and "Cops." It's a "Cops" parody, and the players play it broad. They play it raunchy.

There is no humiliation they won't put themselves through to score a laugh. Too-revealing swimsuits on swimsuit-impaired bodies, inept demonstrations of the proctologist's tools-of-the-trade, sexual encounters of the most embarrassing kind -- it's an R-rated version of the TV show, as if that's a good thing.

It's not quite all for naught. "Reno" () does manage a titter here and a giggle there. But it's a cheap, dumb, obvious movie. How cheap? The big screen never seemed so small.

Cameos by Danny DeVito (his company produced the film), The Rock, Paul "Pee-Wee Herman" Reubens, and Paul Rudd (imitating Al Pacino in "Scarface"), playing a drug kingpin, don't help. Not enough, anyway.

Rated R for sexual content, nudity, crude humor, language and drug use.

-- By Roger Moore,
The Orlando Sentinel