Director Barry Jenkins’ ambitious follow-up to Moonlight adapts James Baldwin’s poignant novel about a woman fighting to free her falsely accused husband from prison before the birth of their child.
"Barry Jenkins follows up Moonlight with this soaring, heartfelt and visually stunning adaptation of a James Baldwin novel about a young, newly pregnant black woman struggling to free her boyfriend from jail for a crime he didn't commit. You've never seen romantic love depicted on screen with such lyrical and gorgeous intensity, or systemic injustice brought to such vivid and enraging life. Film classes will be taught about Jenkins' use of color." — Glen Weldon, NPR
"In Jenkins’s work, loss is a given. He lyricizes it and sometimes seems to wallow in it. Baldwin’s novel — and Tish’s narrative voice — gives him a means of expressing anger. The absurd reaction to the Black Lives Matter in much of the country (Blue Lives Matter! All Lives Matter!) purposely — criminally — ignores the slogan’s reason for being: that historically, Black Lives Didn’t Matter for Shit. Fonny, an artist who might never realize his potential, let alone be a functioning husband and father, is one example in the story Beale Street tells. The others are encompassed by Billy Preston’s mournful, ironic rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” which closes the film and suggests that there is actually no medicine for this kind of melancholy." — David Edelstein, Vulture
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