Lemonade

Lemonade is a visual album built around a collection of short films, made as a companion piece to Beyoncé's album of the same name. Across its hour-long runtime it moves through themes of infidelity and reconciliation in a marriage, and widens into a consideration of race, lineage and feminism in the American South, shifting between satirical, sombre and openly sexual registers. The project draws on poetry by Warsan Shire, written with Beyoncé, and was assembled by a large team of directors.

Beyoncé directs, alongside Kahlil Joseph, Dikayl Rimmasch, Mark Romanek, Jonas Åkerlund, Melina Matsoukas and Todd Tourso. For several of them this was an early directing credit: it is the first entry in Beyoncé's own directing filmography, which later includes HOMECOMING, Black Is King and Renaissance, and also the first for Joseph, Rimmasch and Matsoukas. Romanek and Åkerlund arrived with prior features behind them. The cast runs to dozens of credited performers, with Beyoncé appearing as herself; it was produced by Parkwood Entertainment with Pulse Films, Anonymous Content and Prettybird on a budget of about one million dollars.

Audience response has been strong: it holds 8.3 out of 10 on IMDb from roughly 3,700 votes and 8.4 out of 10 on TMDB from a much smaller sample of 169 votes.