If Beale Street Could Talk's reviews
Media reviews
Los Angeles Times
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.
Chicago Sun-Times
A great American novel has been turned into a great American film.
Roger Ebert
Not much has changed for people of color, which probably wouldn?t surprise the author. And yet, he?d demand we not give up. This film powerfully conveys that message. The struggle is real, but so is the joy. We live, we laugh, we love and we die. But we are not gone. Our story continues, carried onward by our storytellers.
Entertainment Weekly
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.
The Hollywood Reporter
f 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.
The Guardian
It?s a film with love at its root, both familial and romantic, and Jenkins fills so much of it with a radiating warmth.
Variety
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).
The Wrap
This is a film worth grappling with, even if Baldwin?s own talent has a diva-like way of pulling the focus back to his book and away from what we are seeing on the screen