Bold and fraught, The Birth of a Nation merits your attention
MOVIES, AND SOMETIMES THE people who make them, work on us at strange, subterranean levels we can’t always comprehend. That’s why few people know quite how to feel about the debut film by Nate Parker, The Birth of a Nation, only just now reaching theaters but already blighted by controversy. The movie—which tells the story of Nat Turner, the enslaved African American who led a violent revolt against slave owners in 1831—is distinctive for one notable reason: movies about the history of blacks in this country are rarely made, and if you rule out the usual
