Starring: Mahershala Ali, Shariff Earp, Duan Sanderson, Alex R. Hibbert, Naomie Harris
Directed by: Barry Jenkins
Certificate: 15
Running time: 111 mins
UK Release Date: February 16th 2017

Sometimes you need to slow down. The Oscar-nominated films this year are, for the most part, breezy, pacy affairs, which tell their stories at some speed. This is quite the opposite, and with eight Oscar nods it shows sometimes doing the opposite to everyone else can pay off.

The ‘plot’ is a coming of age story for a boy, Chiron (initially called ‘Little’), living in a poor part of Miami, bullied at school and with a crack-addicted mother (Naomie Harris). While the story follows Chiron in chronological order through three stages of his life – boy, student, adult – that suggests a straightforward narrative, which isn’t quite what the film delivers. Moonlight is really an extended mood piece, with very little dialogue – Chiron barely says 10 words through the whole film, and other characters say not much more. [Read more…]