Nikki Amuka-Bird Movies

One man's attempt to help the less fortunate drives him to the edge of madness in this satiric comedy drama from director Ngozi Onwurah. Joe Pascale (David Oyelowo) is an intelligent and idealistic black man living in London who has a high-paying job with a bright future ahead of him. Joe, however, believes he has a responsibility to people less fortunate than himself, and he quits his job to take a position as a teacher in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood dominated by poor blacks. Naïvely assuming his new students will welcome him with open arms, Joe quickly discovers most of his charges have little interest in learning and don't much care for him, thinking of him as a slumming yuppie whose demeanor is more "white" than "black." Joe gets tough with his students through techniques he calls "enforced education," with detention and harsh punishments doled out to kids who refuse to obey. But one of Joe's students, Germal (Charles Mnene), decides to turn the tables by accusing Joe of beating him up. Joe is outraged when most in the community supports Germal rather than himself, and he's fired by the school once the story becomes a cause célèbre in the media. Joe starts losing touch with reality and blames all of his problems on blacks, who he feels have turned their back on him and his talents. After ending up homeless, Joe begins facing his problems by seeing a counselor named Heather (Nikki Amuka Bird), but falling in love with her leads to a new set of emotional dilemmas for him. Shoot the Messenger was screened in competition at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A child that will steer humankind down the road to hellfire has been born, and as his evil flourishes in a world full of hate, the ominous Biblical prophecies slowly begin falling into place in director John Moore's remake of Richard Donner's 1976 horror classic. Robert (Liev Schreiber) and Katherine Thorn (Julia Stiles) were as loving parents as any young boy could ask for, but as fate would have it, their new son Damien is far from the typical child. Now, as the mysterious boy's growth begins to share frightening parallels with the Biblical passages detailing the rise of the Antichrist, and the lives of all who seek to reveal his true nature are cut gruesomely short, Robert and Katherine are forced to face the horrifying prospect that their child has been sent from Satan to hasten the fall of modern civilization, and that there is little they can do to curb his prophesied path of ultimate destruction. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide