'Moonlight': Is This the Year's Best Movie?

"The combination of artistry and emotional directness in this film is overwhelming. Barry Jenkins writes and directs, having adapted Tarell Alvin McCraney's unproduced play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Moonlight is about a young African American man and his coming of age, presented as three stages in his life, like the panels of a triptych. The film has power and generosity, giving such full access to his thoughts and feelings that it's as if you are getting them delivered intravenously. It is the kind of film that leaves you feeling somehow mentally smarter and physically lighter." Read More Here

"Did I ever imagine, during my anxious, closeted childhood, that I'd live long enough to see a movie like “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins's brilliant, achingly alive new work about black queerness? Did any gay man who came of age, as I did, in the era of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and aids, think he'd survive to see a version of his life told onscreen with such knowledge, unpredictability, and grace? Based on a story by the gay black playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney—Jenkins himself is not gay—the film is virtuosic in part because of Jenkins's eye and in part because of the tale it tells, which begins in nineteen-eighties Miami." Read More Here

"Like all great films, Moonlight is both specific and sweeping. It's a story about identity—an intelligent, challenging work that wants viewers to reflect on assumptions they might make about the characters. It's also a focused and personal work, a mental odyssey about the youth, adolescence, and adulthood of Chiron, who is growing up gay and black in Miami. From start to finish, the director Barry Jenkins's new film balances the scope of its ambitions: The story weaves random memories and crucial life experiences into a tapestry, one that tries to unlock the shielded heart of its protagonist." Read More Here

"What does it mean to be Black in America today? That question, too big for any one film to answer, serves as the driving inquiry in Barry Jenkins' “Moonlight,” a beautifully intimate character study that argues in no uncertain terms that the African-American identity is far too complex to be reduced to the flimsy stereotypes so often presented on-screen." Read More Here

"“Who is you, man?” Dramatic film has long been fascinated with issues of identity, but they've rarely been explored with the degree of eloquence and heartbreaking beauty as in Barry Jenkins' masterful “Moonlight,” one of the essential American films of 2016. “Moonlight” is a film that is both lyrical and deeply grounded in its character work, a balancing act that's breathtaking to behold. It is one of those rare pieces of filmmaking that stays completely focused on its characters while also feeling like it's dealing with universal themes about identity, sexuality, family, and, most of all, masculinity. And yet it's never preachy or moralizing. It is a movie in which deep, complex themes are reflected through character first and foremost. Jenkins' film is confident in every single aspect of the way that a critic can use that word. Every performance, every shot choice, every piece of music, every lived-in setting—it's one of those rare movies that just doesn't take a wrong step, and climaxes in a scene not of CGI or twists but of dialogue that is one of the best single scenes in years." Read More Here

"Moonlight director Barry Jenkins obviously doesn't care much for Chekhov's gun. In a Miami-set movie which features two drug-dealer characters, we twice glimpse pistols, supposedly loaded. But neither is ever fired. Russian playwright Chekhov would have argued these unspent firearms are thus superfluous to the plot, but watching Jenkins' second feature, nothing feels superfluous. In fact, it goes deeper than that. The beauty of Moonlight is that it makes everything not only feel keenly relevant, but also somehow beautiful.." Read More Here