Assessment: 63% of key cast and crew members were women. The Sun Is Also a Star simply doesn’t earn the guile required to take Natasha and Daniel’s love to its heartbreaking and inevitable conclusion, tangled up as it gets within its own cheeseball script.

This narrative construct, and in a broader sense the entire film itself, lives between earnestness and eyerolls. In Beale Street, the lifelong friendship between Tish and Fonnie succeeds imminently more than the forced temporal restriction of director Ry Russo-Young’s adaptation, as Natasha and Daniel keep running into each other in a series of unlikely coincidences. The Sun Is Also a Star lacks the layered story that Jenkins builds through believable cause-and-effect events. Toss in circular pans for lovers’ embraces and budding relationships that quake under the threats of systematic forces-the incarceration of Black men in Beale Street and deportation for The Sun Is Also a Star-and viewers can’t help but see the parallels.

Both are based on novels and rely on voiceovers and still photography for exposition, while shallow depths of field keep the couples at the forefront. Thanks to its sweet romance and young protagonists of color, as well as some aesthetic and narrative similarities, The Sun Is Also a Star recalls Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). Interpreting their meeting as fate, Daniel offers the reluctant Natasha a challenge: Give him 24 hours, and he’ll make her fall in love with him. Writers: Screenplay by Tracy Oliver 👩🏼🇺🇸 based on the novels by Nicola Yoon 👩🏾🇯🇲🇺🇸īased on the best-selling YA romance by Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star revolves around the relationship between two immigrant teens: Natasha Kingsley (Yara Shahidi, who commands an exceptional performance) and Daniel Bae (Charles Melton).ĭaniel, an idealistic poet, spots the sardonic Natasha wearing a jacket with the phrase “Deus Ex Machina” among a crowd of people at Grand Central Station right after scribbling the same words in his notebook.

The sun is also a star novel