BLACK NATIVITY, now a film (Cert. PG), has enjoyed regular outings as a stage musical since its first production in 1961, dressed up in ever-changing contemporary rags and narratives over the years. The movie version has Jacob Latimore play a young tearaway, Langston. He sets off from the Baltimore home of his despairing lone parent, Naima, (the Dreamgirls diva Jennifer Hudson) to stay in New York for Christmas with grandparents the Reverend Cornell Cobbs and his wife, Aretha (Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett).

It is surely no coincidence that the teenager has the same Christian name as Black Nativity's author, Langston Hughes. Like the film's protagonist, Hughes was, in the absence of a father, brought up partly by his mother, and at other times by his grandparents.

As far as the film is concerned, the New York sequence is a getting-to-know-you kind of encounter. While the Cobbs and Langston are technically kin, they aren't exactly kith to one another at this point. That state of play is exacerbated by the "My house, my rules" regime that the pastor insists on.

But then, over time, amid setbacks and resolution, Langston throws his lot in with the local church's nativity play. More and more he identifies with the tenets of the Christmas story. In terms of genre-recognition, the film is Carmen Jones meets Jesus of Montreal, whereby an all-singing, all-dancing Negro cast morphs into the very characters of the nativity play in which they're participating. They lend their considerable talents to belting out gospel and modern-day showstoppers in a mawkish but often uplifting interpretation of "this most wondrous tale of all".

One might want to quibble that Afro-American families seem stereotyped here as fatherless, poor, and criminal, unless they happen to be clergy. But Langston learns about faith, reconciliation, and community without the benefit of a magic wand's transforming his situation into some kind of middle-class happily-ever-after existence.

Initially, the stage show was called Wasn't It a Mighty Day? I'm glad they changed it, because this is nativity, not panto. Nativity will be a lifetime's journey for Langston, as for us.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN's The Hobbit was first published in 1937, before the Lord of the Rings (1954-55) volumes; but the film director Peter Jackson has done it the other way round. The second of a trilogy of Hobbit movies, The Desolation of Smaug (12A), reaches cinemas today. After three long Rings movies, Jackson has transformed the relatively short 365 pages of The Hobbit into huge money-spinning prequels.

In a slow-moving first leg, An Unexpected Journey, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) agreed more readily than in the book to be whisked away from his complacent life in the Shire, to assist the reinstatement of Erebor's people to their mountain homeland under Prince Thorin's leadership. Noteasy, nor yet achieved; but at least by the end of that film he was equipped with a magic ring from Gollum (Andy Serkin), which renders its wearer invisible.

Once again, in Hobbit 2, Jackson doubles the normal 24 frames per second to create visually stunning images that help compensate for the drop in brightness that usually accompanies 3D presentations. Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) is the terrible dragon who has invaded the Lonely Mountain and usurped Thorin. He is about to have his come-uppance, although Bilbo's battles this time aren't just of the action-packed kind.

Amid all the film's crash-bang-wallops - of which there are (too?) many - the scene that deserves our fullest consideration is Bilbo's moral dilemma over the enchanted ring. We are free to interpret this obsession with ownership as disobedience to God, denoting our preference for lesser powers; ones that will ultimately lead us into evil ways. Unlike his friend C. S. Lewis, however, in his fantasy stories Tolkien was at pains to avoid any overt correlations with Christianity. This is not allegory. He lets mythological tales do their own work.

Jackson makes films in a similar fashion, but with more fun-filled asides and strong women than the source material's solemnly masculine style encompassed. And he leaves us with a cliffhanging end that will irritate or intrigue you. It is the lead into next December's instalment (more Jackson than Tolkien), There and Back Again, Tolkien's alternative title to the book.

Talking of titles, it is worth pondering the current film's use of "desolation". Tolkien, philologist and Christian, would choose his words carefully. Before we can receive consolation, there must first have been desolation, when the sun was darkened, a time when evil prospered before its defeat.

The Hobbit is set in End Times where eventual farewell to "the abomination of desolation" (Mark 13.14et al.) is presaged in these Last Days by the rise of one whose advent sets the people free. Wittingly or unwittingly, the distributors have decided to release this film in exactly the right season of the Church's calendar.

Both on general release from today.