Barry Jenkins directs Trevante Rhodes, Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali in this triptych following the coming of age of a gay black youth in a crack addled area of Miami.

I feel a little sorry for Moonlight. A small scale, well crafted, bravely experimental and sensitive (if not all that emotionally sophisticated) character study, that now has the weight of expectation that a Best Picture Oscar brings crushing down hard on its shoulders. It is too slight, too personal a film to bear that populist weight, that sneering scrutiny and I feel over time it will suffer an equally unbalanced backlash as one of those notoriously undeserved Academy Awards fuck ups. Not cloying like Crash or A Beautiful Mind (genuine Oscar fails), it still is not quite as moving, intelligent or eye opening a look into the young black experience as say Boyz N the Hood, Fresh or series 4 of The Wire… nor as brilliant a cinematic exploration of a man outside the stereotypical “gay norm” accepting his sexuality as seen in Brokeback Mountain or Beginners. It is, however, a perfectly fine one watch movie, with strong support turns from Harris and Ali, and striking neon infused visuals. I kept seeing echoes of Terrence Malick in the directorial choices and this worked well. One true frustration? I would often praise a movie for not holding the audiences’ hand every step of the way but Moonlight’s aggressively oblique structure often skips what feels like key moments of drama. That’s a stylistic choice but it is one that deprives of us of seeing plot points that would grip, while suggesting only young Chiron’s experience is of value while other characters triumphs and tragedies are at best distracting background noise. The focus is selfishly narrow.

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