Friday 6 December 2013

"Black Nativity" (The Guardian 06/12/13)

                
Black Nativity (PG) 93 mins **

An eccentric one, this: writer-director Kasi Lemmons has deployed Langston Hughes’ off-Broadway pageant as the centrepiece of a contemporary musical about a delinquent teen enduring Christmas in New York. Beneath middling songs – walloped out in the artless, post-Cowell manner – there’s something faintly touching about its vision of broken homes; it’s when our boy is forcibly shown the light that the gap between heavenly ambition and desultory execution becomes too vast for a simple leap of faith to bridge. Points for dogged credulity: whether trying to pass off Times Square as Judea or Tyrese Fast & Furious Gibson as the Angel Gabriel, it sincerely believes it. You, of course, are at liberty not to.
 
Black Nativity opens in selected cinemas from today.

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