Barry Jenkins’ (Medicine for Melancholy) Moonlight is an ambitious film in many ways. Though it mainly revolves around the uncertainty of being gay, it also touches on many of the other important issues of the day, including adolescent bullying, drug abuse, masculinity, broken relationships, and poverty. The acting in this movie is out of this world. Never does this feel like a movie to me. Instead, it feels like you are just an invisible camera watching three different stages of a male discovering and dealing with his sexual identity in the hardships of a destitute part of Miami, Florida. The film is divided into three chapters. All are centered around Chiron. At age 6 or 7, he is referred to as Little. At age 16 or 17 (the chapter that gets the most focus), he is Chiron. And for the last chapter, he’s 26 or 27 and goes by Black. He’s equally conflicted in all three different stages of his life. The simplicity of this movie is its strength. If you like artistic movies that center around a real story with characters who feel real, you will find this movie riveting.
Category Archives: Naomie Harris
Southpaw (2015)
History probably will not remember this because he missed earning an Academy Award nomination for the first performance and may again miss out on this one. Still, the physical transformation from Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance as sickly, twisted reporter Lou Bloom in 2014’s fantastically crafted Nightcrawler to the lean, mean, fighting machine Billy Hope in 2015’s Southpaw is remarkable. As people watch either or both of these movies in the future, I think they will fail to remember that he filmed these two movies back to back. But aside from how he changed the physical look of his body for each of these roles, his acting performance in each of these films might be the two best in a career that continues to hit all the right buttons, save for The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I’ll first see Southpaw that the less you know in, the better off I think you will be. So if you haven’t seen it, I will list my overall score of the film here, and I would suggest not reading any more until after you’ve seen the movie or if the surprise factor isn’t something you are interested in. I will alert you when I add spoilers to this review. I would give Southpaw an overall score of 87.5/100.
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