“While Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years a Slave was a more sophisticated, artful means of reckoning with slavery’s past, The Birth of a Nation plays like a formulaic but undeniably pointed corrective to mainstream American cinema. Its landmark Sundance deal — $17.5 million plunked down by Fox Searchlight — speaks directly to the embarrassing market gap for black history in the movies. Produced outside the system (by an actor infuriated by the dearth of substantial black roles, no less) and now grandfathered into it, the narrative surrounding Birth of a Nation holds more power than the actual film. Repurposing the title of D.W. Griffith‘s infamously racist silent epic, Parker’s Birth of a Nation is a sturdy, halfway decent piece of filmmaking.” — from Eric Kohn’s 1.26 Indiewire review.