“If Beale Street Could Talk”

Annapurna Pictures

Barry Jenkins’ location scouting for his adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel were also a lesson in geography — a chance, he says, for him to denote “these unofficial lines of demarcation that Mr. Baldwin was so obsessed with” and are so essential to understanding the film’s springboard of an innocent man charged with rape. Jenkins also had to find ways to show and not tell. Early in the film, after a bout of domestic violence, Regina King’s character kicks the men out of her apartment to create a gender divide — probably her only accessible course of action.