’Moonlight’ director Barry Jenkins returns with a film arguably even better — a cinematic blues song that soothes even as it disturbs.
Barry Jenkins’ characters glow. That’s really the only way to describe them, so radiant and redolent and inviting that you can’t help but fall in love. Jenkins and his cinematographer James Laxton (who also shot Moonlight) are the most sensual filmmaking team working, and in If Beale Street Could Talk, they’ve created more visual comfort food, the optical equivalent of Sam Cooke’s voice, or Mahershala Ali’s laugh — a booming, soulful thing that you just want to wrap yourself in like a winter coat. Beale Street is the black Brooklyn, a heartfelt elegy to our most recent ancestors, a kind of collective home movie of black Americana.
