THE NEW YORK TIMES
By A.O. Scott
Can going to a movie be a moral obligation? A political gesture? “The Birth of a Nation,”
Nate Parker’s debut feature as a director, presents an unusually vexing and complicated case. In the months between its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January and its release this Friday, the movie — which dramatizes the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 — has found itself on both sides of the argument, simultaneously the must-see and the won’t-see movie of the year. But then, in August, details emerged about a sexual assault case involving Mr. Parker when he was a student at Penn State in 1999. [
link]
