There are only clichés in the rise-and-fall material of Kasi Lemmons’s biopic.
Shaka King’s film, anchored by two sterling lead performances, complicates the expected narrative of martyrdom.
Once an accidental act of violence sends the main character’s life into a spiral, the film unfortunately spirals with him.
The film might have better performed if it consisted of more than a smattering of good but relatively isolated ideas.
The film envisions Denzel Washington’s Robert McCall as a hero in absolute concord with the world of his own fiction.
Moonlight’s unlikely success hopefully implies that the world has yet to slide entirely down a rabbit hole of unbridled bigotry.
What tends to right Moonlight, even when Jenkins’s style drifts into indulgence, is the strength of its actors.
The acting in Moonlight elevates the clichés of Barry Jenkins’s script into something approaching lived truth.
Less old-fashioned than demure and passé, evoking the visual style and rhythms of a 1990s made-for-TV movie rather than a daring, revisionist independent feature.