“We love you.”

From Respect.

As a young girl growing up in 1952 Detroit, Aretha Franklin (Skye Dakota Turner) is torn between the mother (Audra McDonald) she loves and her controlling but music-encouraging father (Forest Whitaker). At her father’s weekly parties, Aretha would be brought out to sing for family friends such as James Cleveland (Tituss Burgess), Clara Ward (Heather Headley), Dinah Washington (Mary J. Blige), and Martin Luther King Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown), which only fueled her passion for music. Despite a terrible childhood that included her mother’s unexpected death and two pregnancies while she was a child herself, Aretha (Jennifer Hudson) held tightly to her love for singing as a young woman. Leaving her children with her grandmother (Kimberly Scott), Aretha spent several years touring with Martin and her father on a civil rights tour around the nation. Seeking to keep her control of her musical career, Aretha’s father gets John Hammond (Tat Donovan) from Columbia Records to sign her to the label, but the nine albums released contain no hits. Wanting both to release a hit song and to rebel against her father, Aretha soon marries the passionate Ted White (Marlon Wayans), who then becomes her manager. Ted gets Aretha picked up by Atlantic Records and begins producing a song under the direction of Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron). Wanting to change things up for Aretha in hopes of creating a hit, Wexler sends Aretha to record a song at a small southern recording studio owned by Rick Hall (Myk Watford). Aretha is able to record the highly successful song “I Never Loved a Man” with Hall’s musicians, but Ted’s insane jealousy and abuse forces Aretha to leave him. After learning that the song has been released and highly accepted, Aretha returns to Wexler with her sisters (Hailey Kilgore and Saycon Sengbloh) as backup singers and her brother (LeRoy McClain) as her booking manager, and she quickly records more successful albums. After finally divorcing Ted, Aretha fell in love with her global tour manager, Ken Cunningham (Albert Jones), but her alcohol-fueled spiral threatens to destroy her completely until she gets the desire to record a risky gospel album.

Inspired by the life of the soul music legend, this movie is both heartbreaking and inspiring. Hudson is powerful in her performance of the trauma-filled life that lead to some of the world’s most iconic songs. Although occasionally confusing with the timeline, Respect is a captivating look at Franklin’s life and life-changing music.

| Rated: PG-13 | Running Time: 145 minutes |Genre: biography/music/drama|

||Family Viewing||Cursing: 3* of 10|Nudity: 0 of 10|Sexuality: 0 of 10|Gore: 1 of 10

|AVAILABLE FOR HOME VIEWING|