Recencies van critici

What is film but a medium that asks us to experience worlds — physical and emotional — beyond our own? It's when it brings us to tears or makes us overflow with joy that film has the possibility of slipping past our defenses to challenge how we perceive the world and maybe even ourselves. The way to accomplish this isn't to try and tell a story that aims to speak to everyone but crafting one that traffics in specificity. No recent film does that with greater success than Moonlight.

The Oscar-winning film Moonlight gives an impression throughout of being tinged with the color blue. Already in the beginning, after a blue car, its blue interior, white T-shirt and pillow tinted blue by morning light, blue sneaker soles, and blue plastic trash cans at the beach, comes an extraordinary scene of a black man holding a black boy's body on top of the ocean, the camera lowered until it is fractionally submerged, enclosing the baptism by swimming lesson in pale sky and rolling water.

Chiron is the perfect embodiment of the blank protagonist, an archetype whose passiveness challenges the very nature of protagonism (proto = first, main, most important; agon = challenge, struggle, dispute) but who has become especially common in the art house world. Projected against the landscape of Rousseau's philosophy, this blankness borders the ideal of "the natural man", the uncorrupted savage . . . , which matches the latent impression that the boy is self-raised.

Its delicate humanism; Laxton's hauntingly intimate photography; the brilliant performances of the cast; Barry Jenkins' masterful direction—this has all stayed with me since I reluctantly walked left the theatre on that balmy Saturday afternoon. The ushers had politely made their presence known as soon as the end credits began, but I was not ready to leave the cinema just yet... I wanted to listen closely to Nicholas Britell's lush"End Credits Suite" as it played out the film's closing credits.

Jenkins looks into the chasm of a damaged soul and demands from viewers not only an acknowledgement of universality, but a reckoning of acceptance. By film's end, Black has the bravery to finally voice his desires after years of stifled muteness, and the reciprocation that he receives in return feels like nothing less than a miracle. Yet, this catharsis is undercut by a lingering truth: that many people are allowed to take such a miracle for granted.

The most admirable thing about the film is its commitment to intimacy; this strength is manifested in the skilful proximity of James Laxton's cinematography and the small-scale parameters of the storyline... Moonlight's uniqueness as a film about a queer black youth cannot be overstated, and it skillfully filters rhetoric through realism.

The Liberty City of [Jenkins and McCraney's] childhood was at once a place that buckled under the rages of crack but also, defiantly, maintained a cultural richness and sense of community that nurtured and inspired the two men — it was a place that both contained and freed them. And it is the way that "Moonlight" captures that tension — between the beauty and the struggle — that makes the film so powerful.

Thanks to Jenkins's direction, the amazingly responsive actors, the expressive soundtrack, and particularly James Laxton's cinematography, these moments are deeply immersive—we experience them, as Chiron does, with all our senses. They become indelible in our memories as in his, and carry him and us forward to the final section's transcendent meeting in the diner between the adult Chiron and the adult Kevin, taking a chance on love.

This is how a film of such crucial, culture-shifting specificity manages to be so overwhelmingly universal. As a portrait of masculinity, Moonlight is both unflinching and empathetic. And as an exploration of inchoate desire, it is wise, generous, and cuts very, very deep.

A film so beautiful in story, struggle, love, connection, danger, drugs, race, masculinity, black masculinity, and one made more poetic by cinematography and performance, particularly by Trevante Rhodes, that one leaves the theaters with images and thoughts lingering.

What is remarkable about Moonlight is that Jenkins and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney have crafted a film which has this place so deep in its bones that it strikes me as impossible to separate any aspect of its form from the context which produced it, and which is in turn reflected through the frame of its moving and fascinating central figure, Chiron.

It's difficult to describe just why this film is so unique, so powerful. The plot sounds like an ABC Afterschool Special. It is Jenkins' handling of it – the mood he deliberately creates – his understanding that silence can be as loud as dialogue, and far more eloquent – that really makes the film. I rarely say this, but Moonlight is not like anything else. The final scene was so quiet and powerful that I don't think I breathed the entire time.