Moonlight

What is Moonlight about?

Barry Jenkins tells one life in three chapters. As a child in Liberty City, Miami, Chiron is called Little and is taken in by a drug dealer, Juan, who teaches him to swim and refuses to lie to him. As a teenager he is bullied, his mother's addiction is worsening, and one night on the beach with his friend Kevin becomes the only tenderness he has ever been offered. As an adult he has rebuilt himself into someone armored enough to survive, and then Kevin calls. Adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, the film is about the specific loneliness of a boy who knows he is different long before he has language for it, and about the cost of the body you build to get through that. Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes are all doing career work. The last twenty minutes, in a diner, are the most restrained love scene of the century. It won Best Picture and it deserved it.

I cried in a theater full of strangers. It understands the specific loneliness of being a boy who already knows he is different and has nobody safe to say it to.