If Beale Street Could Talk
Angel Films | Release Date: December 14, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
87
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 53 Critic Reviews
Positive:
52
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeFeb 13, 2019
The result is another mesmerising and wholly immersive experience from a film-maker whose love of the medium of cinema – and fierce compassion for Baldwin’s finely drawn characters – shines through every frame. Read full review
100
EmpireHelen O'HaraFeb 4, 2019
A sort of Romeo And Juliet with systemic racism replacing the family feud, this is romantic and infuriating, hopeful and despairing. A sensory, desperately emotional experience for lovers and fighters alike. Read full review
100
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldDec 26, 2018
If Beale Street Could Talk is a film about injustice, about patience and anger, beauty and despair — but, ultimately, it’s about love. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperDec 23, 2018
A great American novel has been turned into a great American film. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy BurrDec 20, 2018
Baldwin knew that hope is the engine that takes us to the future, to a changed and better day, and whether that hope is embodied in action, in expression, or in a child is immaterial. If Beale Street Could Talk is a stained-glass window looking out onto what could still be. Read full review
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayDec 19, 2018
Deliberately paced, unapologetically mannered and contemplatively attuned, If Beale Street Could Talk invites audiences to venture beyond the screen in front of them to connect with the characters and their world on a deeper, more mystical plane. Read full review
100
UproxxVince ManciniDec 13, 2018
Its power is in the way it says that injustice isn’t out of place in a heartwarming family drama; it’s part and parcel to these characters’ experience, to being black in America. Like the blues, Beale Street can soothe even as it tells a disturbing story. It’s easily one of the best of the year. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comOdie HendersonDec 10, 2018
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. Read full review
100
SlateInkoo KangDec 5, 2018
In the movies, love is cheap. It’s everywhere and nowhere, too often reduced to a formula or a reward. Beale Street knows better. It restores to love, romantic and familial, its sanctity—an ambition that makes it one of the most distinctive love stories in recent memory. Read full review
100
The TelegraphTim RobeyOct 19, 2018
If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage. Read full review
100
Slant MagazineKeith UhlichSep 24, 2018
The film is at its most potent in the scenes where human frailty and the specter of injustice come more elliptically to the surface. Read full review
100
CineVueChristopher MachellSep 12, 2018
If Beale Street Could Talk is a rich, tender and poetic film as much about love as it is about injustice. Read full review
100
Consequence of SoundSarah KurchakSep 11, 2018
Weaving together the past and the present, masterful interpretations of Baldwin’s incredible prose, gorgeous visuals, and a sweeping score, If Beale Street Could Talk draws audiences into its overwhelming mix of emotions all at once. Read full review
100
Vanity FairK. Austin CollinsSep 10, 2018
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. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangSep 10, 2018
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. Read full review
100
The PlaylistJason BaileySep 9, 2018
Jenkins captures the humor, verve, and considerable complexity of the prose. Read full review
95
IGNMatthew DoughertyDec 13, 2018
Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk is beaming with style and detail, but at its core, it’s a mindful meditation on human beings seeking the greatest gift we can give each other—love. Read full review
91
Film Journal InternationalWendy R. WeinsteinJan 4, 2019
It’s a perfect pairing of sensibilities; Jenkins and Baldwin share a nuanced, lyrical style that conveys the beauty and hope in even the most despairing of situations, with a focus on the emotional truths of their characters. Like the novel, the film is a love story, as well as a powerful indictment of systemic racism and the criminal-justice system. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Sep 12, 2018
The film fares best when Jenkins just trusts the expressive force of his filmmaking, when he uses his own tools to evoke, if not match, the magic of Baldwin’s writing. Read full review
91
The Film StageChristopher SchobertSep 11, 2018
Barry Jenkins has created a film both tender and tough, with a time, a place, and a story to lose oneself in. Sublime in its depiction of an emotional connection and subtle in its layers of systematic oppression, Beale Street is a major work from a filmmaker whose gifts are clearly boundless. Read full review
91
IndieWireEric KohnSep 10, 2018
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. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzDec 24, 2018
Jenkins brings an urgency to If Beale Street Could Talk, along with the melancholy of problems still yet to be solved. Read full review
90
The AtlanticDavid SimsDec 13, 2018
If Beale Street Could Talk is an impressive, mature, and determined work that ably reaches the great heights it sets for itself. Read full review
90
Rolling StonePeter TraversDec 11, 2018
It’s the sort of cinema that feels steeped in the past, completely of the moment and timeless all at once. Read full review
90
Film ThreatTiffany TchobanianDec 9, 2018
If Beale Street Could Talk is an immersive experience. Viewers will get wrapped up in Baldwin’s timely tale of love, perseverance, and prejudice. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinSep 15, 2018
Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton’s palette is rich and warm, its colors deepened by a score by Nicholas Britell that ranges from a distant, forlorn trumpet to a string quartet in which the players dig in as if they’re having their own dialogue between hope and despair. The close-ups are immense, the emotions archetypal. Read full review
88
Movie NationRoger MooreJan 6, 2019
For all the resilience Baldwin and Jenkins show us here, it is the poet Langston Hughes’ line about “a dream deferred” that comes most easily to mind. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenDec 25, 2018
If Beale Street Could Talk is less interested in railing against systemic racism than lamenting the everyday goodness that is lost when racism carries the day. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsDec 21, 2018
What Baldwin does with words, Jenkins does visually. It’s what Blanche DuBois says in “A Streetcar Named Desire”: “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” In “Beale Street” that magic can be crushing, and soul-stirring, sometimes simultaneously. Jenkins’ epilogue, not found in the novel, may go a little far in its embrace of the affirmative. But that’s hardly the worst thing you can say about any film, let alone one as lovely as this one. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 17, 2018
The film’s ensemble cast provides a case study in unforced, emotionally powerful acting. Read full review
88
The Associated PressLindsey BahrDec 12, 2018
“Moonlight” is a hard act to follow, and while Beale Street might not quite reach the heights of Jenkins’ instant classic of a best picture-winner, it is its own kind of marvel, lovely, transcendent, heartbreaking and as smooth as its jazzy soundtrack. Read full review
85
Paste MagazineDom SinacolaDec 25, 2018
The heartbreaking bravery of Barry Jenkins’ third brilliant film is that he rests upon a clean, aching ambiguity: Such hope is both enough, and will never be enough, because nearly 50 years later nothing has changed. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattSep 10, 2018
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. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawFeb 6, 2019
In some ways, If Beale Street Could Talk is a portmanteau movie with great performances from KiKi Layne, Regina King and Brian Tyree Henry, a succession of scenes from interrelated lives, constellated around the main narrative arc and supercharged with an ecstasy of sadness and knowledge. Read full review
80
Total FilmNeil SmithJan 21, 2019
A superlative slice of ’70s social realism. Read full review
80
Time OutPhil de SemlyenDec 14, 2018
The resulting film is beautifully crafted and, despite what Hitch might say, definitely cinematic. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternDec 14, 2018
We’re watching a period piece that feels beautifully and painfully present: beautifully because love stories are timeless, painfully because the spectacle of racial injustice feels up to date. Read full review
80
The New York TimesManohla DargisDec 13, 2018
When Jenkins is true to himself, he soars; he stumbles, though, when he’s overly faithful to the novel or doesn’t trust the audience. Read full review
80
VoxAlissa WilkinsonNov 18, 2018
Elegiac and lovingly wrought, If Beale Street Could Talk is darkness laced with light, a story that has not stopped being true in the years since it first was told. Read full review
80
ScreenCrushE. Oliver WhitneySep 14, 2018
If Beale Street Could Talk is a movie about racism and the incarceration of black Americans – realities as significant and relevant today as they were when Baldwin’s novel came out – but most importantly, the deep, shining love that pulses through Tish and Fonny’s story never fades. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 10, 2018
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. Read full review
80
Screen DailyTim GriersonSep 9, 2018
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. Read full review
80
The GuardianBenjamin LeeSep 9, 2018
It’s a film with love at its root, both familial and romantic, and Jenkins fills so much of it with a radiating warmth. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerDec 19, 2018
While there is poetic grace, that's not to say that there's no didacticism. Like Baldwin, Jenkins has a rigorous sense of what is broken in society. Read full review
75
ObserverRex ReedDec 17, 2018
If Beale Street Could Talk is sad, sobering, gritty and graceful — more a reflection of the underrated James Baldwin than the overrated Barry Jenkins. Read full review
75
USA TodayBrian TruittDec 14, 2018
The cast is superb, especially King. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerDec 14, 2018
For all the film’s righteous anger and obeisance to Baldwin, it remains a baffling, amorphous construct. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorSep 10, 2018
Jenkins creates many remarkable scenes, particularly as the male characters discuss the racist realities with which they live. Read full review
70
TheWrapDan CallahanDec 13, 2018
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. Read full review
70
The New YorkerAnthony LaneDec 3, 2018
This interfamily clash, fizzing with one-upmanship, is the highlight of the film, and that’s the problem. The planets of the plot, as it were, are more exciting than the sun around which they revolve. Read full review
70
VarietyPeter DebrugeSep 9, 2018
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). Read full review
63
New York PostSara StewartDec 14, 2018
Jenkins is a master of cinematic portraiture, but he’s so captivated by the magic of a moment — even a single image, like cigarette smoke swirling around one of Fonny’s carved-wood sculptures — that he sometimes forgets he’s got an audience expecting a plot. Read full review
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