7.4 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
A woman in Harlem desperately scrambles to prove her fiancé innocent of a crime while carrying their first child.
Starring: KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Colman Domingo, Teyonah Parris, Michael BeachDrama | 100% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Romance | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.00:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.00:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, Spanish
Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
Digital copy
DVD copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 5.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Martin Luther King, Jr. famously pronounced, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” though on a microscopic level you’d be hard pressed to prove it by the rampant immoralities and injustices depicted in If Beale Street Could Talk. This riveting follow-up to (eventual) Best Picture winner Moonlight by writer and director Barry Jenkins has a redolent literary imprimatur, having been culled from a novel by the redoubtable James Baldwin, but in its own way this film addresses at least some of the same issues as Moonlight did, albeit admittedly in sometimes radically different ways. The film begins with an epigraph by Baldwin which seeks to help elucidate the symbology of Beale Street:
Beale Street is a street in New Orleans, where my father, where Louis Armstrong and the jazz were born.
Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, born in the black neighborhood of some American city, whether in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy. This novel deals with the possibility and the impossibility, the absolute necessity, to give expression to this legacy.
Beale Street is a loud street. It is left to the reader to discern a meaning in the beating of the drums.
If Beale Street Could Talk is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.00:1. The IMDb lists the Arri Alexa 65 as having digitally captured the imagery at a source resolution of 6.5K, which was then finished at a 4K DI. As can be seen from some of the screenshots accompanying this review, the look has been tweaked toward a more "traditional" filmic quality, and there's a really beautiful, and surprisingly organically rendered, texture to this presentation that really helps it to achieve significant depth a lot of the time. Some interstitial moments have been "degraded" somewhat so that they almost resemble 16mm (see screenshot 15 for one example). The palette is just gorgeously robust throughout this film, but it's interesting to note how Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton tend to choose little pops of color in otherwise rather drab surroundings, in a visual gambit that kind of reminded me of a line in the song about another Harlem, "there is a rose in Spanish Harlem". Textures on things like Tish's green corduroy coat or some of Fonny's sculpting are precise looking and virtually palpable at times. The one stylistic choice here that frankly didn't quite work for me were the interstitial black and white photographs. They're often evocative as all get out, and just as often rather disturbing, but they tended to interrupt the story for me rather than support it or comment on it. That said, contrast and detail levels are excellent throughout all of the black and white stills.
If Beale Street Could Talk features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that delivers some of its most immersive moments courtesy of a really fine score by Nicholas Britell, as well as a variety of source cues that are utilized (the use of Billy Preston's gospel tinged "My Country Tis of Thee" to accompany the closing credits will probably be an extremely emotional experience for some). The film's use of densely populated frames where a number of characters are interacting also helps to offer good surround activity, as do several outdoor scenes in urban environments. The cloistered confines of the "glass wall" area where Tish and Fonny interact has some distinctive sonics as well which are recreated in a very realistic manner. Dialogue is always rendered cleanly and clearly on this problem free track.
There's no getting around the fact that If Beale Street Could Talk is not a particularly "easy" watch, and in fact it's emotionally devastating on any number of levels. The fact that the film actually leaves a wake of hopefulness in the detritus of so much tragedy is one of its most commendable aspects. Technical merits are first rate, and If Beale Street Could Talk comes Highly recommended.
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Includes Elia Kazan: Outsider 1982 Documentary
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60th Anniversary Edition
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