London Film Festival Day 7: The Birth Of A Nation, I Am Not A Serial Killer & Layla M

3. The Birth Of A Nation

Ignore the unsavoury controversy surrounding writer-director-star Nate Parker's personal life, and his movie about Nat Turner's slave rebellion is...really not worth all that rapturous Sundance hype.

Though it benefits majorly from the committed performances (most of all Parker himself) and a certain compelling grimness, Parker's inexperience as a director severely lets the film down, allowing it devolve into sappy melodrama and indulge some rather ham-fisted attempts at symbolism.

Visually, the film is all over the place, switching at a moment's notice from gorgeously-composed, haunting imagery to something so flat and lifeless it wouldn't look out of place in a Lifetime production.

With all this considered, The Birth of a Nation isn't a bad movie: it's actually a fairly decent directorial debut, but it's difficult not to come into the film with a tremendous amount of baggage given that it has been touted as an Oscar hopeful for nine months now.

Rating: Infuriatingly, appropriately shocking, The Birth of a Nation is a harrowing portal into the past, but is also compromised severely by the questionable creative decisions of its driving creative force. 6/10