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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
11
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jan 13, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Coates' writing packs clarity into its lyricism, and at just shy of an hour and 20 minutes Forbes' film honors the book's relative economy while enriching every frame with poignance, augmented by Bradford Young's arresting cinematography. ... The result is magnificently solemn and essentially American.
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Nov 20, 2020
Season 1 Review:
All of it combines to bring Coates’s words up off the page with startlingly precise intent. Old news footage transitions to recent outrages; dreams are shattered and reassembled to reflect unflinching truths. There’s as much to look at as there is to hear; the words and images meld almost seamlessly.
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Nov 19, 2020
Nov 18, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The HBO version is a gorgeously sorrowful prose poem about being Black in America, then and now. It hits you in your head but mostly your heart, as it blends together emotional readings from Coates’s book, archival clips of the Black experience in America, a searching soundtrack that breaks into hip-hop songs, sequences of animation and watercolors, and other ambient devices. It’s not a documentary, or a staged recitation, or a music video; it’s all of them and more.
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Nov 18, 2020
Season 1 Review:
There’s something lost in this translation between page and screen that depends upon this many performers; their interpretations are still powerful, but immediately more scattered, and it’s hard not to wonder if a more pared down version might have been even more effective. And yet it’s even harder to imagine which speakers should get cut, as nearly all convincingly ground themselves in the material.
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RogerEbert.comNov 20, 2020
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