Dir. Jonathan Demme. 1998, 172 mins. 35mm. With Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise. In the hands of director Jonathan Demme and producer-star Oprah Winfrey, Toni Morrison’s long-thought unadaptable novel becomes a masterful tour de force, furiously bringing the Nobel Prize-winning author’s epochal metaphors to blistering, bruising life. Winfrey disappears into the role of Sethe, an escaped slave living in Ohio whose life with her teenage daughter is interrupted by the arrival of a most unexpected visitor, Beloved, the ghostly manifestation of her long-deceased baby girl, embodied with alarming commitment by a brilliant Thandie Newton. Demme’s Beloved is a work of astonishing empathy and visual invention, and is one of the very greatest American movies of the last thirty years.