If Beale Street Could Talk

If Beale Street Could Talk will take you on a journey of visual ecstasy with narrative beats that create a solid adaptation of James Baldwin's emotional material. (pub date: Sept 2018)

Lyrical and very transporting.

Jenkins's If Beale Street Could Talk is a gorgeous, enveloping film -- and one of its most poignant triumphs is how vividly it captures the depth and complication of intimacy among its black characters.

It's a stunning and sensuous film, gorgeously crafted and performed - the story of young lovers in an unjust world. It'll make your heart flutter and ache.

Just as the novel version of If Beale Street Could Talk moves between love story and protest novel, a balance Baldwin strikes throughout many of his works, Jenkins' adaptation uses flashbacks to oscillate between two worlds.

Jenkins doesn't scratch the surface of the black American experience. He takes you deep into its bones and suggests that far less has changed than the naive may believe.

The love story shown from Kiki Layne and Stephen James is the most romantic, realistic relationship on screen this year...

There’s an entire world created in this movie, a reflection of our reality, but soaked in Jenkins’ dreamlike view.

A beautiful love story that offers a mosaic of injustices, some of which can be overcome by love, others with no solution.

If I had the money, I’d personally finance Barry Jenkins to adapt all of James Baldwin’s novels into films. He is one of the few truly poetic film-makers in the world.