MOONLIGHT MOVIE MOVIE
MOONLIGHT MOVIE FULL

The casting of three different actors is a visible part of the film’s theatrical inheritance: a formally stylised effect, with each new incarnation a jolt, and obviously different from the incremental, almost geological changes achieved in Richard Linklater’s real-time movie Boyhood. He is a very questionable caregiver and role model, with an inexpressibly painful and ironic relationship with Little and his mom, and Jenkins shows how Black’s own conflicted destiny follows the example laid down long ago by Juan. Juan provides food, comfort, support, but also drugs. Juan lets Little stay at his place occasionally, looks out for him he gives him a swimming lesson which becomes a kind of baptism. The narrative arc is both initiated and held together by a wonderfully charismatic performance from an actor who appears only in the first act: it is Mahershala Ali, playing Juan, the Miami drug-baron with a kindly, fatherly side who protects Little when he sees him getting chased by other kids. ‘It’s all about perception’: director and cast on Oscar contender Moonlight Guardian

Then he gets a phone call from his past: Kevin (André Holland), is now out of prison himself, an absent father, working as a chef. Finally, as a result of rage, self-hate and jail time, Chiron bulks up, grows new layers of muscle and becomes unrecognisable in his last evolutionary stage of development: reinventing himself as Black (Trevante Rhodes). Now he is played by Ashton Sanders, and he is recognisably the same kid, only a bit older, slight, spindly, gawky, with a watchful silence that is a symptom of and a defensive strategy against the vicious bullying he endures from Terrel (Patrick Decile), a guy who has a malicious sixth sense for Chiron’s growing relationship with classmate Kevin (played by Jaden Piner as a kid and Jharrel Jerome as a teen). As a teen, he is known by his given name Chiron. Jenkins takes us through the scenes of his life: as a kid he is called Little (Alex Hibbert), always getting picked on, worried about his drug-addicted mom, Paula ( Naomie Harris). Jenkins is not shy of breaking out Mozart’s Laudate Dominum over a woozy, wordless scene of kids playing. There is an array of visually ravishing dream sequences, epiphanic surges, hallucinatory closeups, lush swathes of music. Moonlight put me in mind of John Singleton, Terrence Malick and Charles Burnett, but also Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story the structure even had me thinking about Tolstoy’s trilogy: Childhood, Boyhood and Youth. Love, sex, survival, mothers and father figures are its themes, the last one foregrounded by the poignant absence of the fathers themselves. It is the kind of film that leaves you feeling somehow mentally smarter and physically lighter.

MOONLIGHT MOVIE FULL

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. 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. Barry Jenkins writes and directs, having adapted Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unproduced play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. T he combination of artistry and emotional directness in this film is overwhelming.

Moonlight movie