The best (what there was) of 2016 from George Thomas

By George M. Thomas

"La La Land" is a full blown, retro musical worth the time.

For years I’ve tried to avoid slapping the “best” label on a list of films at the end of the year. The reasons are numerous, the primary one: I’m not a filmmaker.

There’s too much craftsmanship that goes into making a film for me to completely understand what goes on behind the scenes.

I do, however, know what I like. Oddly enough it usually dovetails with the stuff a lot of critic-types eventually put on lists at this time of the year. Call it 50-some odd years of watching warmed over cinematic hash.

Moonlight (opens November 10th at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[MOONLIGHT opens in Cleveland on Friday November 11th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

A group of schoolboys are a blur as they chase a classmate, taunting and tormenting him through a Miami neighborhood filled with abandoned houses. The boy, Chiron (Alex Hibbert), takes refuge in a boarded-up apartment, weeping silently as his persecutors bang loudly on the doors and windows.

The opening scene of MOONLIGHT, Barry Jenkins' adaptation of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney's script “In Moonight Black Boys Look Blue,” grabs you by the ventricles and holds on, through Chiron's childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. James Laxton's camera swirls and settles, and Nicholas Britell's haunting music accents Chiron's chaotic life and his struggle for acceptance and identity.