Black Nativity introduces Langston (Jacob Latimore), who was named after the great artist Langston Hughes by his parents. An ordinary teenager – spending his free time causing a ruckus with his friends on the cold, cold streets of Baltimore – Langston cannot escape from the inner turmoil he feels, due to the fractured state of his family. His mother (Jennifer Hudson) works multiple jobs and long hours just to make ends meet, his father is long gone and Langston has never even met his grandparents.

 

 

In the midst of a last-ditch effort to avoid being evicted, Langston’s mom sends her son to spend Christmas with her father, the devoted Reverend Cobb (Forest Whitaker) and his wife (Angela Bassett) in New York City. Following a rough introduction to life in ‘The Big Apple’, Langston quickly tires of his grandparents’ refusal to discuss the event that drove their daughter away years ago and decides to take drastic action in an effort to care for himself and his mother. However, thanks to some “divine intervention,” Langston instead winds up on a journey to understand the past – and in the process, learns how to heal the spiritual wounds that linger on in the present, within himself and those around him.

The Harlem Renaissance leader and iconic Black American activist/artist Langston Hughes wrote the Black Nativity stage play, which is a retelling of the classic Nativity story – albeit, one where traditional Christmas carols and hyms are performed in the gospel style – often accompanied by African percussion – with other unconventional creative elements incorporated into the format (unorthodox symbolic lighting, additional soliloquies, etc.). In other words: Hughes’ musical theater work doesn’t exactly lend itself readily to an ordinary film musical.

Writer/director Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou, Talk to Me) deserves kudos for having been able to reshape the Black Nativity source material to fit the mold of a standard three-act film structure, without completely sacrificing the substance of Hughes’ original play. Lemmons even manages to update select themes and concepts, by changing the setting to the present-day and expanding the scope of the narrative. Unfortunately, when taken as a whole, this cinematic interpretation only amounts to a competent adaptation; which, depending on how you view it, is better/worse than being a full-on disaster/success. read more: http://screenrant.com/black-nativity-reviews-movie-2013/