Thuson Mbedu as "Cora" in The Underground Railroad In four films Barry Jenkins has established himself as a high artist of the Black American experience. Gaining heft and budget from his success with Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins signed up both Brad Pitt’s Plan B Pictures and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon to tackle one of the biggest projects on race in America, the adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad. While it may be tempting to see in Barry Jenkins’ Tolstoyan adaptation of The Underground Railroad, the influences of painters Julius Block, Kerry James Marshall and various film directors, as the New Yorker did in its review this week. All of us do project a bit of our own influences into likenesses we recognize. I just did with Tolstoy, for it’s clear to me that both Jenkins and Whitehead saw the dying light of a way of illegitimate life in their big canvas stories.