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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