If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
Critic Reviews
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100
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The Playlist Jason Bailey
Jenkins captures the humor, verve, and considerable complexity of the prose.
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100
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Los Angeles Times Justin Chang
In cutting against the aesthetic grain, Jenkins gently and wisely corrects our vision. The passionate glow of this filmmaker’s embrace belongs, quite rightly, to his characters. He is generous enough to also extend that embrace to us.
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100
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Vanity Fair K. Austin Collins
What Jenkins gets most right—what astonishes me the most about this film—is Baldwin’s vast affection for the broad varieties of black life. It’s one of the signature lessons of Baldwin’s work that blackness contains multitudes.
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91
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IndieWire Eric Kohn
If Beale Street Could Talk stalls about halfway through with less involving developments and stilted roles for supporting characters...but it always regains its footing with another entrancing observation.
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83
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Entertainment Weekly Leah Greenblatt
In some ways Beale feels less like a movie than a well-staged, meticulously shot play; a period piece that floats beyond its specific time and place and into the realm of allegory.
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80
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The Guardian Benjamin Lee
It’s a film with love at its root, both familial and romantic, and Jenkins fills so much of it with a radiating warmth.
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80
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Screen Daily Tim Grierson
If Beale Street isn’t quite as seamless as the Oscar-winning Moonlight, this adaptation of the James Baldwin novel still proves to be a stirring, absorbing experience that articulates something ineffable about everyday life.
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80
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The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
If the movie’s slow burn seems to build toward a powerful release that doesn’t materialize, the sheer beauty of its craft and the heartfelt feeling behind every scene nonetheless command attention.
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75
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The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Kate Taylor
Jenkins creates many remarkable scenes, particularly as the male characters discuss the racist realities with which they live.
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70
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Variety Peter Debruge
The movie quotes Baldwin as saying, “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street,” but this one may as well be located inside a snow globe. In deciding how to translate Baldwin’s prose to the screen, Jenkins may as well have made Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as a Douglas Sirk movie (or put Alice Waters’ “The Color Purple” through the Steven Spielberg filter).
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