Moonlight is a quiet film.
I actually had to turn up my speakers just to hear the dialogue, and had to turn them up even more when, after ten minutes, our protagonist resentfully speaks his first words. He doesn’t follow those words up with too many more. Whoever else he is, Little, or Chiron, or Black, is not one for big speeches. His feelings maintain an internal smolder, clear in his downturned eyes and inward-sloping shoulders and perpetual inability to stand in the middle of the frame. Our hero is a man of big feelings afforded minimal release. There is so much there, so much contained in all his unhappy, furtive glances, so much preserved across the astonishingly congruent performances of three brilliant actors.