Moonlight
A24 | Release Date: October 21, 2016 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
99
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 53 Critic Reviews
Positive:
53
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
CineVueBen NicholsonFeb 16, 2017
Bold in ambition and delicate in execution, it will break your heart and then piece it back together. Read full review
100
EmpireDan JolinFeb 13, 2017
A genre-defying film. Its visual splendour belies its tough, surface-level subject matter, while the performances pull us deep below that surface with their soulful naturalism. Read full review
100
Total FilmRob JamesFeb 13, 2017
Sensitive, subtle and heartfelt, Jenkins’ genre-buster is a significant work that will knock you out. Read full review
100
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallDec 8, 2016
Moonlight is a modest masterpiece, and quite possibly the best film of 2016. Read full review
100
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottNov 3, 2016
The result is an unconventional film that exists in a class by itself to this point in 2016. Read full review
100
Philadelphia InquirerTirdad DerakhshaniNov 3, 2016
It’s a true American masterpiece and one of the best films of the decade. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy BurrNov 3, 2016
In its quietly radical grace, it’s a cultural watershed — a work that dismantles all the ways our media view young black men and puts in their place a series of intimate truths. You walk out feeling dazed, more whole, a little cleaner. Read full review
100
Austin ChronicleSteve DavisNov 2, 2016
While all of the performances in this movie are superb, Harris’ turn here is hands-down award-worthy. Read full review
100
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzNov 2, 2016
Moonlight is a minor miracle, a movie that mines beauty out of the ugliest situations, and a glimmer of hope from heartbreak. Read full review
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorOct 27, 2016
Happily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has in Moonlight exactly the kind of small, smart film that the Awards should be recognizing more often. Whether it will actually win is another matter: Jenkins’s script and his direction are bracingly free of the sentimentality Oscar so loves. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperOct 27, 2016
Moonlight is gorgeous and yet bleak, uplifting and yet sobering, exhilarating but also grounded in some unshakable realities. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleOct 27, 2016
Every year, we get only a few of these, movies that come out of nowhere, that are different, unexpected and wonderfully right. Moonlight is that kind of movie, one of the gems of 2016. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsOct 27, 2016
The reason it's distinctive has less to do with raw emotion, or a relentless assault on your tear ducts, and more to do with the film medium's secret weapons: restraint, quiet honesty, fluid imagery and an observant, uncompromised way of imagining one outsider's world so that it becomes our own. Read full review
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayOct 27, 2016
Directed with superb control and insight by Jenkins, Moonlight achieves the near-impossible in film, which is to ground its story and characters in a place and time of granular specificity and simultaneously make them immediately relatable and universal. Read full review
100
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezOct 27, 2016
Sometimes, the simplest, smallest things require the greatest courage. Moonlight is Miami’s first bonafide movie masterpiece. Read full review
100
The New YorkerRichard BrodyOct 24, 2016
Jenkins burrows deep into his characters’ pain-seared memories, creating ferociously restrained performances and confrontational yet tender images that seem wrenched from his very core. Read full review
100
MTV NewsAmy NicholsonOct 21, 2016
Jenkins has made something astonishing: a film with immaculate craft that, at the same time, feels spontaneous, even tentative, as if it could panic that it’s revealed too much and close the curtains. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonOct 20, 2016
It’s a masterpiece — an overused word, but not the wrong one. Read full review
100
SlateDana StevensOct 20, 2016
Moonlight is one of those movies that showers its audience with blessings: raw yet accomplished performances from a uniformly fine cast, casually lyrical camerawork, and a frankly romantic soundtrack that runs the gamut from ’70s Jamaican pop to a Mexican folk song crooned by the Brazilian Caetano Veloso. But the film’s greatest gift may be that flood of cleansing tears—which, by the time this spare but affecting film was over, I was also shedding in copious volume. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyOct 20, 2016
Easily one of the most personal and most powerful films of the year. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottOct 20, 2016
Moonlight is both a disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces. Read full review
100
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Oct 20, 2016
Moonlight lets us see Chiron, to see his silent heartache written across three different faces, and that seems a hell of a lot better than good. Read full review
100
Rolling StonePeter TraversOct 20, 2016
Moonlight, which announces Jenkins as a major filmmaker, gets you good. It stays raw from first scene to last. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranOct 20, 2016
Moonlight is magic. So intimate you feel like you're trespassing on its characters souls, so transcendent it's made visual and emotional poetry out of intensely painful experience, it's a film that manages to be both achingly familiar and unlike anything we've seen before. Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinOct 19, 2016
Hype would bruise Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, which is so delicate in its touch that the usual superlatives sound unusually shrill. It’s the gentlest, most suggestive of great films. Read full review
100
Village VoiceMelissa AndersonOct 19, 2016
A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins's wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: "Who is you, man?" The beauty of Jenkins's second feature...radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics and expansiveness, not with foregone conclusions. Read full review
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinOct 6, 2016
Moonlight, the new film from Barry Jenkins, is a nuclear-fission-strength heartbreaker. It’s made up of moments so slight and incidental they’re sub-molecular – but they release enough heat and light to swallow whole cities at a stroke. Read full review
100
ConsequenceNico LangOct 1, 2016
Under Jenkins’ direction, Moonlight is both haunting and poetic, a bittersweet elegy for what could have been. His unflinching camera, which tends to follow the film’s characters like a ghost, gives the film a startling immediacy and emotional power. Read full review
100
We Got This Covered Darren RueckerSep 19, 2016
Moonlight captures the limitations of masculine conventions in an incredibly sympathetic, deeply felt way. Read full review
100
The Film StageJared MobarakSep 15, 2016
Jenkins glimpses at the human soul and the hellish experiences endured despite it. We’re shown humankind’s capacity to change and the notion it’s never too late. Read full review
100
TimeStephanie ZacharekSep 13, 2016
A coming-of-age movie, and a love story, that leaves you feeling both stripped bare and restored, slightly better prepared to step out and face the world of people around you, with all the confounding challenges they present. There’s not much more you can ask from a movie. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoSep 11, 2016
Moonlight is a film that is both lyrical and deeply grounded in its character work, a balancing act that’s breathtaking to behold. It is one of those rare pieces of filmmaking that stays completely focused on its characters while also feeling like it’s dealing with universal themes about identity, sexuality, family, and, most of all, masculinity. Read full review
100
Time OutJoshua RothkopfSep 11, 2016
Moonlight takes the pain of growing up and turns it into hardened scars and private caresses. This film is, without a doubt, the reason we go to the movies: to understand, to come closer, to ache, hopefully with another. Read full review
100
The GuardianBenjamin LeeSep 3, 2016
It’s a thrilling, deeply necessary work that opens up a much-needed and rarely approached on-screen conversation about the nature of gay masculinity. Read full review
100
Screen DailyTim GriersonSep 3, 2016
Ambitious in scope but precise in its execution, this deceptively small-scale character piece reverberates with compassion and insight. Read full review
100
VarietyPeter DebrugeSep 3, 2016
A socially conscious work of art as essential as it is insightful. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 3, 2016
Barry Jenkins' Moonlight pulls you into its introspective protagonist's world from the start and transfixes throughout as it observes, with uncommon poignancy and emotional perceptiveness, his roughly two-decade path to find a definitive answer to the question, "Who am I?" Read full review
100
IndieWireEric KohnSep 3, 2016
Moonlight transforms rage and frustration into unadulterated intimacy. In this mesmerizing portrait of a suffocating world, the only potential catharsis lies in acknowledging it as Chiron so deeply wishes he could. Despite the somber tone, Moonlight is a beacon of hope for the prospects of speaking up. Read full review
100
The PlaylistGregory EllwoodSep 3, 2016
Like Brokeback Mountain a decade ago, Moonlight is a piece of art that will transform lives long after it leaves theaters. Read full review
95
TheWrapSam FragosoSep 3, 2016
It’s a humanist film; it’s about people, and it’s got a pulse. It presents characters as idiosyncratic, domineering, but mostly fearful — timid creatures ambling through life in the hopes of finding refuge. Read full review
93
Film Journal InternationalChris BarsantiJan 4, 2019
A tragic romance of identity embedded in a voluptuous atmosphere, Moonlight flirts with visual and thematic excess. But the emotional integrity of its characters, seamlessly maintained from one set of actors to the next, who so desperately want to love, pulls it back from the brink. Read full review
90
IGNAlex WelchJan 4, 2019
Moonlight is a complex, haunting coming-of-age story unlike anything else this year. Read full review
90
ScreenCrushE. Oliver WhitneySep 12, 2016
It’s a film that aches with beauty. It cries with longing. It quakes with a rich sadness that lingers with you long after the final moments. A masterpiece of poetic filmmaking, Moonlight is one of the most powerful films of the year. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 9, 2016
Although Barry Jenkins’ film is indeed about the struggles and difficulties of a person embracing his culturally reviled sexuality, the story is universal in scope and intent. Read full review
88
Movie NationRoger MooreNov 12, 2016
Gay coming-of-age stories are common enough these days, but Moonlight finds a new perspective, a new setting and a compelling new filmmaking voice to tell that story. It’s one of the best pictures of the year. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonNov 10, 2016
The performances are spot-on. Ali brings depths of feeling to Juan, giving us a drug dealer we haven’t seen before. Harris (Miss Moneypenny in the recent Bond films) is uncomfortably authentic as an ultimately repentant junkie. Read full review
88
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldNov 3, 2016
Barry Jenkins’ beautiful Moonlight seems to have more in common with poetry than with a typical narrative film. It’s less a story than a collection of moments, which leaves its viewer feeling moved and changed, as if you’ve spent time in someone else’s dreams and woke up understanding who they are. Read full review
88
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanNov 3, 2016
It may cast a spell on anyone who has known loneliness, exclusion, feelings of inferiority or a desire to be encased in a hard shell to protect a soft interior. Read full review
88
New York PostSara StewartOct 20, 2016
There is so much pain in Moonlight that it’s a little hard to breathe at certain moments. But there are others, of connection and redemption, that positively glow. Read full review
87
The VergeTasha RobinsonSep 17, 2016
Moonlight is hypnotic not just as a character study, or as a coming-of-age story. It's hypnotic as a performance piece, full of flawless portrayals of a kid figuring out who he is, not just in relation to other people, but in relation to himself. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsStephen Whitty Oct 14, 2016
Even when the storytelling falters - several crucial scenes take place in between the various segments, with major events happening off-screen - Jenkins' sharp eye and his film's beautiful cinematography keeps us watching. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerOct 28, 2016
So few unexploitative movies are made about young black men, especially young black gay men, that the overpraise for this frail, sweet, discursive fantasia is understandable – and forgivable. It’s a beautiful film around the edges. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineSam C. MacSep 25, 2016
What tends to right Moonlight, even when Barry Jenkins's filmmaking drifts into indulgence, is the strength of its actors. Read full review
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