If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

Barry Jenkins follows Moonlight with an adaptation of James Baldwin's 1974 novel, a film that arrives wrapped in the softest possible lighting and the heaviest possible subject matter. A pregnant young woman named Tish watches her fiance Fonny sit in a cell for a crime we know he did not commit, and the machinery that placed him there is not subtle. Landlords who will not rent to Black couples. A police officer whose testimony is accepted at face value. A lineup in which the victim is told whom to identify. The film lays all of this out with patience and beauty, and the beauty does a great deal of the arguing. Nearly every face on screen is Black, and Jenkins photographs those faces as though they were the entire purpose of cinema, which for him they may be.

The perspective belongs to Tish, and to the women around her. Her mother flies to Puerto Rico to beg a stranger for her son-in-law's freedom. Her sister holds the family together while the men absorb their grief in bars. A matriarchal engine drives a story about a man in a cage, and it works without ever pausing to announce itself as such. The social critique lives in every frame and is rarely spoken aloud, which is its own form of restraint. When characters do discuss race, they do it in kitchens and doorways, tired, not triumphant.

There are gestures toward the economic desperation beneath the injustice, though the film cares more about love than about systems. It is a romance first. It is a Baldwin adaptation second. It is a sermon almost never. The result is a work of enormous feeling and almost no scolding, which in this decade of cinema amounts to a miracle of manners.