Review: 'Renaissance' lets Beyoncé take her fans on tour with her, and shows them the work behind the magic
The magnetic force of nature that is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter — also known to the world simply as Beyoncé — is on full display in “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” a documentary that captures the performer’s high-energy stage show and the hard work behind the scenes to make it happen.
As Beyoncé says early in the film — which she directed, wrote and produced — process is as important to her as the final product, and she includes plenty of backstage and rehearsal footage to capture that process. Through those scenes, fans witness the circle of acceptance that envelops her dancers and musicians, her love for her home town of Houston, and how she recovered from knee surgery while rehearsals were underway.
Some of those moments dovetail with the songs. For example, several gay and trans dancers — veterans of the dancehall and vogue movements — talk about how they got to incorporate their styles into Beyoncé’s concert, and then we see them perform “Break My Soul” with its sampling of Madonna’s “Vogue.”
About a third of the movie’s nearly three-hour running time is taken up with interesting stuff not happening in performance. But when the cameras are aimed at the stage, Beyoncé and crew make it worth the wait with a sensual, sensational series of performances.
Beyoncé’s film crew apparently filmed every show on this year’s “Renaissance” tour, and she and her team of editors stitched them together, even when she and her dancers were wearing different costumes in different cities. There are moments when the choreography and the camera movement are so exact that it appears everyone has switched clothes in the blink of an eye.
Inevitably, comparisons will be made between “Renaissance” and “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” the concert documentary released seven weeks earlier that captured a different 2023 stadium tour. (We have Ye, and his asinine “I’ma let you finish” rant at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, to thank for the artificial and sexist feud narrative involving Beyoncé and Swift.) Both deliver the goods for the performers’ respective fans — they just do it in different, and equally fascinating, ways.
Swift’s movie shot several shows at one location and put together a seamless document of one complete concert. With “Renaissance,” Beyoncé is going for a different effect — she doesn’t want to give us one show; she wants us to feel what it was like to be on the entire tour.
“Renaissance” is, Beyoncé says early in the film, “more than a concert. It’s a culture, it’s a state of mind, it’s a release, it’s a fantasy come true.” A concert it definitely is, in all its glory. Whether it’s everything else she promises is up for fans to decide.
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‘Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, December 1, in theaters everywhere. Not rated, but probably R for language and suggestive lyrics. Running time: 169 minutes.