Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)

The first film with an all-black cast to win the Best Picture Oscar, and with a gay lead character to boot, Moonlight at first glance goes through all the standard motions for both genres: he's a skinny poor kid in a Miami ghetto, bullied for being so different from an early age, his mum's a hopeless crackhead, and then he goes to prison to emerge a beefed-up drug dealer. That would indicate that there's nothing new on offer.
But that summary is exactly the point of the film: it's a causal progression that suggests that given an unfavourable enough set of circumstances to begin with, your destiny is inescapable. That would still be thoroughly depressing if the monosyllabic, withdrawn lead wasn't given an inner dream life and it wasn't handled with such finesse. The sheer desperate loneliness of the character at all the three stages of his life that we see is a searing indictment of how society can force those who don't fit in into a guise of hyper-masculinity and a lifetime of opportunities missed. It won't be everyone's cup of tea for all that, but the merits do have to be acknowledged.

7/10