Alma’s Rainbow review – 90s New York tale of Black womanhood and sexuality is worth the wait

It’s a woman’s world for Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) in this dusted-off 90s gem from a pioneering Black film-maker, getting its first, very belated, release in UK and Irish cinemas. Rainbow’s mother, Alma (Kim Weston-Moran), is the respectable proprietor of a beauty parlour, operated out of their Brooklyn brownstone and between appointments as she instructs her teenage daughter in the principles of financial independence and keeping one’s legs shut. Rainbow, however, has other ideas, encouraged by her fabulous, French-speaking Aunt Ruby (Mizan Kirby) and her own raging hormones.

Ayoka Chenzira wrote and directed this film only a few years after Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust became the first feature film directed by an African American woman to get a US theatrical release. But 1994 was apparently still too soon for this appealing mother-daughter story to reach the same audiences who had warmly embraced Steel Magnolias (1989) and Mermaids (1990).

A complex combination of racial politics and marketing missteps is likely to blame, but 30 years on, this Dash-championed 4K restoration makes one thing clear: Alma’s Rainbow has matured into a worthwhile watch, with appropriately colourful costumes, a curvy jazz score and plenty of hard-won womanly wisdom to impart.

• In UK and Irish cinemas