For Fans of Moonlight

Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes each play Chiron without a single scene together, yet the film makes you feel the through-line of one person completely. The device of casting three actors for three life stages should be alienating. Instead it is the most precise way Jenkins could show how identity fractures under pressure and reconstitutes itself into something armored and unrecognizable. The boy and the man look nothing alike. That gap is the whole film.

James Laxton's cinematography turns Liberty City into a place of strange beauty, the kind a child sees in a neighborhood that the world has decided to stop looking at. The film refuses to make the setting either a trap or a backdrop. The streets, the stairwells, the beach at night: they shape Chiron without explaining him. This is what the best urban films do, and it is rare.

Jenkins has spoken directly about the influence of In the Mood for Love on his approach to romantic longing and withheld desire. Both films understand that what people cannot say to each other is more present than what they do say. The camera watches faces for the emotion a character will not voice. The result is a kind of tenderness that more explicit filmmaking cannot reach.

Without spoiling the third act for those who have not seen it: Moonlight ends on a conversation that covers almost nothing and everything simultaneously. It is two people talking around what they mean in real time, and Jenkins holds with them without cutting away when it gets unbearable. Cinema rarely earns that patience. When it does, it changes what you expect from a film.