GamesRadar+ Verdict
Sensitive, subtle and heartfelt, Jen🐓🦩kins’ genre-buster is a significant work that will knock you out.
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Moonlight review: "Jenkins’ genre-buster is a significant work that will knock you out"
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“At some point, you gotta decide for yourself who you want to be,” says drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali) to Chiron, a 10-year-old boy living in Miami with no father and a crack-dependent mother (Naomie Harris). From this brief description, Barry Jenkins’ film might sound like every other ’hood movi🌄e. But little about this story of identity, sexuality, class a൩nd race is run-of-the-mill.
Charting three distinct chapters in the life of Chiron, spanning roughly 16 years, Moonlight is almost impossible to categorise beyond its loose ‘coming-of-age’ tropes. Touching on issues of bullying, addiction and, above all, sexual confusion and repression, it’s a superbly crafted piece of work that frequently takes a sledgehammer to the stereotypes too easily associated with African-Amerꦍican cinema.
Inspired by Tarell Alvin McCraney’s theatre piece In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, Jenkins uses different actors to play Chiron and his friend Kevin in the trio of chapters (dubbed ‘Little’, ‘Chiron’ and ‘Black’, after the various names our hero’s known by). We begin with Little (Alex Hib💞bert), who’s near-silent for the first 10 minutes after Juan discovers him in a crack den.
