If Beale Street Could Talk

In seventies Harlem, Tish is pregnant and her fiancé Fonny is in prison for a rape he did not commit. The film treats the injustice not as courtroom suspense but as a weight lodged inside the daily life of two families. The source is James Baldwin's 1974 novel. Barry Jenkins wrote the screenplay in the summer of 2013 while working on Moonlight; the project was only announced in July 2017 and shooting began in New York that October. Regina King won Best Supporting Actress and the Golden Globe in the same category as Tish's mother Sharon Rivers. Nicholas Britell's score was nominated for an Oscar and holds the emotional spine of the film. On a 12 million dollar budget it grossed 20.6 million worldwide, posting one of the best per-venue averages of 2018 in limited release. Both the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute named it among the year's ten best. Who it is for: readers of Baldwin and viewers who want visually rich, warm-toned cinema. Who it is not for: anyone needing resolution. The film ends where justice has not arrived, deliberately.