The Birth of a Nation
Fox Searchlight Pictures | Release Date: October 7, 2016 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
69
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 50 Critic Reviews
Positive:
36
Mixed:
13
Negative:
1
Watch Now
Buy on
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Expand

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
60
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonOct 6, 2016
What Mr. Parker has committed to the screen is a righteously indignant, kinetic and well-acted film — Mr. Parker, as Turner, delivers a fierce, complex performance. At the same time, his film is remarkably conventional. The framing and the camera movements are all very routine, even dated; one would have said it looks like television, before television gained its current lustre. Read full review
60
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottOct 6, 2016
The Birth of a Nation is ultimately involving as a cinematic history lesson. It is its flashes of modern relevance, however, in which it scores most effectively. Read full review
60
TimeStephanie ZacharekOct 6, 2016
The Birth of a Nation isn’t a great movie – it’s hardly even a good one. But it’s bluntly effective, less a monumental piece of filmmaking than an open door. Parker stars as Turner, and his performance is grounded and thoughtful – he may be a better actor than he is a director. Read full review
60
Village VoiceAlan ScherstuhlOct 6, 2016
The Birth of a Nation offers a troubling tangle of the personal and historical. But above all else it's commercial, an entertainment of purpose and some power. Parker knows how to juice a crowd. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranOct 6, 2016
The Birth of a Nation certainly has the power of conviction, but the grace of art escapes it. Read full review
60
Time OutJoshua RothkopfOct 5, 2016
What you will find is a film that toggles between impressive fury and a kind of made-for-TV blandness that does Nat Turner’s 1831 uprising — still controversial — no favors. Read full review
60
ScreenCrushMatt SingerOct 5, 2016
A famous (though almost certainly false) quote attributed to President Woodrow Wilson compared Griffith’s work to “writing history with lightning” and the best sections in Parker’s Birth of a Nation are charged with a similar kind of cinematic electricity. Many of his directing choices are obvious but bluntly effective. Read full review
60
The GuardianLanre BakareJan 26, 2016
Mostly, the film is heavy-handed, with subtlety nowhere to be found. Read full review
58
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerOct 7, 2016
An actor making his directorial debut, Parker, who plays Turner and also co-wrote the script with Jean McGianni Celestin, has taken hold of an incendiary subject and coarsened its complexities into agitprop. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzOct 6, 2016
Like many Mel Gibson films, as well as such revenge-driven revisionist Westerns as "Posse" and "Django Unchained," The Birth of a Nation is an intriguing object, passionate and furious and shameless and slick, distorting history in both defensible and problematic ways. Read full review
50
We Got This CoveredMatt DonatoOct 3, 2016
The Birth Of A Nation is not without inherent power, but Parker struggles to evoke anything besides surface tellings of textbook atrocities. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineMatt BrennanOct 2, 2016
Nate Parker strains to control the strange and stirring complications of his subject's visionary apocalypticism. Read full review
42
MTV NewsAmy NicholsonOct 9, 2016
The direction is so heavy-handed that it feels like Parker is afraid audiences don’t know slavery is wrong. Or maybe that truth is all he’s comfortable using Nat Turner to say. Read full review
More From This Movie

69 Critic Reviews

5.4 User Reviews

Details & Credits|Trailers

Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score
1 77 Project Hail Mary
2 75 Send Help
3 73 Hoppers
4 72 The Sheep Detectives
5 63 Normal
SEE ALL
Essential Links
New on Amazon Prime Video
New on Netflix
Coming Soon to DVD/Blu-ray
SEE ALL