Here are review links for this film submitted by our members:
- Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Texan Reviews
- David Bax @ Battleship Pretension
- Excerpt: Jenkins has never been a trepidatious filmmaker but we’ve never seen him in a mode of such supreme confidence as this.
- Frederic & Mary Ann Brussat @ Spirituality & Practice
- Excerpt: A masterwork about resilient young love and the challenges faced by blacks in racist America.
- Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: a pure and gentle story of love enduring an onslaught of hate in 1970’s Harlem.
- David Crow @ Den of Geek
- Excerpt: Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk is a lucid cinematic tome.
- Karl Delossantos @ Smash Cut Reviews
- Excerpt: If Beale Street Could Talk is gorgeous, powerful, stunningly crafted, and another masterpiece from Barry Jenkins.
- James Jay Edwards @ FilmFracture
- Mark Hobin @ Fast Film Reviews
- Excerpt: How can the reflective inertia of the rest of the film compete with mother Sharon’s emotional fire? Every time actress King is on screen I was riveted.
- [New] | Blake Howard @ Flicks.com.au
- MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
- Excerpt: A beautiful story about ugliness, about dignity in the face of hatred, told via delicate yet steely performances that imbue it with a power at once tender and infuriating. Totally enrapturing.
- Wesley Lovell @ Cinema Sight
- Excerpt: Many filmmakers over the years have explored the human condition, but few have given the black community the same attention to passion and detail as Barry Jenkins has in his second feature directorial effort, “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
- Simon Miraudo @ Student Edge
- Excerpt: The director of Moonlight returns with a dreamy, 1970s love story that has present day resonance.
- Jared Mobarak @ JaredMobarak.com
- Excerpt: Much like with Moonlight, Jenkins seeks to express [sacrifice and heroism through survival with] a poetic construction of resonant images, sounds, and experiences. He brings us into this world of aching love and romance tinged but never tainted by the horrors of what looms large above every action.
- Aaron Neuwirth @ We Live Entertainment
- Excerpt: Jenkins relies on confidence afforded to him by his actors, and the various filmmakers he is working with.
- Frank Ochieng @ The Critical Movie Critics
- Excerpt: [A] soulful and artfully penetrating drama…a refreshingly stark and candid observation about the compelling anatomy of strong black love, commitment, sacrifice, and impenetrable faith. Poetically affecting and eerily as relevant today as the 70s…
- Eddie Pasa @ DC Filmdom
- Excerpt: Tackling societal pressure, social mores, gender roles, abuse of power, religious hypocrisy, and – above all – love, If Beale Street Could Talk is a gorgeously-shot and acted film, relevant on either side of its timeframe. It’s a film which wishes for its characters – and the audience as well – to stay hopeful in the face of the insurmountable, its force speaking through its quiet tones and its engrossing construction.
- Adam Patterson @ Film Pulse
- Bev Questad @ It’s Just Movies
- Excerpt: Jenkins’ film is a treasure as is Nicholas Britell’s score accompanying it. Together with a great ensemble cast and outstandingly sensitive cinematography, this film will be placed amidst the classics.
- Jonathan Richards @ Pasatiempo
- Excerpt: If the film has a flaw, it lies perhaps in a shade too much lyrical sensitivity, but that sensitivity also serves the atmosphere of contrasts that Jenkins so powerfully creates.
- Ruben Rigaud @ Cocalecas.net [Spanish]
- Júlio Cézar Rodrigues @ Loucos por Filmes [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: A good melodrama, shot in a very sophisticated way, with great performances and a remarkable soundtrack.
- Don Shanahan @ Every Movie Has a Lesson
- Excerpt: Through its sights and sounds, If Beale Street Could Talk is smashing and significant to present what is beautiful through all that is painful.
- Courtney Small @ Cinema Axis
- James Wegg @ JWR
- Excerpt: By far and away the best dramatic film I have seen this awards season, it is clear from the first frame (overhead—wonderful touch of many) that Jenkins’ realization of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel is as true to the author as it is universal to any race or creed trying to survive in “white man’s” world.
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