Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • A34

34 Frid 17 Febr 2017 Going Out Like us on Facebook facebook.com/esgoingout Follow us on Twitter Growing pains Hi en Fi res Cert PG, 127 mins HHHHI Film of the week MOOnLi HT Cert 15, 111 mins HHHHH David Sexton This poetic coming-of-age story about gay identity and masculinity is pure, exquisite cinema and deserves to sweep the Oscars cowering and crying as his tormentors throw rubbish at him. The unexpectedly kindly Juan rescues him you doing in here little and takes him home. This is Little, the young Chiron, a boy so traumatised he hardly dare speak a word, traumatised both by his home life with his druggy mother (Naomie Harris, shockingly good in this role, when more used to seeing her play strong women) and the stirrings of a gay identity that is suspected and rejected by his peers before he knows it himself. In a big-skied playing field scene, a friend, Kevin, tells him, always let people pick on and they tussle in a way half a fight but almost an embrace. In a spectacular beach scene, Juan teaches Little to swim filmed from half below the waves, like a form of rebirth and some life-lessons too: some point got to decide for yourself who you want to be you let somebody make that decision for OO good to be true? Maher shala calm presence is such that it seem so, even when Little asks him, a and he replies correctly: faggot is a word used to make gay people feel But, still feeling his way into his own life, Little then asks Juan if he sells drugs and, when he admits he does, follows through with a painful inference: mother, she do drugs, In the second chapter Juan has gone and Chiron (Ashton Sanders), hunched and head down, is being bullied at school by his macho classmates and begged for money by his now bug-eyed and desperate mother.

But in a visually stunning night scene, back on the beach with his friend Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), smoking a little dope, he almost opens up: cry so much sometimes, I feel like gonna They embrace, Kevin affectionately giving Chiron a handjob, swiftly realising, never done nothing like that before, When they say goodnight we see Chiron smile for the first time. But the high-school horrors worsen and Chiron, until now so repressed, erupts into violence. In the third act Chiron, now known as (Trevante Rhodes) has, after prison time, transformed himself into a version of Juan: massively muscled, sporting gold grillz and a do-rag, an intimidating, gun-toting drug dealer himself, in downtown Atlanta. He started over, he built himself from the ground up, built himself hard, he says. Now he looks the scary one.

Out of the blue, after years, he gets a call from Kevin Holland), now running his own diner back in Miami, AFTLY, Moonlight was completely overlooked by the Baftas; it be by the Oscars. only the second feature from Barry Jenkins, 37 his first, Medicine for Melancholy, an indie romcom about a one-night stand between a pair of twentysomethings, having been made on a budget of just $15,000 some eight years ago. That debut won one award, from the San Francisco Film Circle, being set in that city. Moonlight, which has already won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama, is up for eight Oscars. It is based on a short, never-produced, autobiographical play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, which he wrote as a drama- school project at the start of his career.

He has since found fame, winning the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award as early as 2008, and a $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 2013, but perhaps this is his finest work. McCraney, 36, and Jenkins came from the same rough Liberty City housing projects in Miami and attended the same junior and middle schools but had never met, McCraney being a year younger. Both had been affected by having severely drug-addicted mothers, surviving being HIV-positive for 24 years, having succumbed to Aids. McCraney is gay, Jenkins straight, but Jenkins says he saw himself in play every way except for that one aspect of his It was fortunate that play had never been produced, Jenkins says, since was enough space that I could create something That he has done. Moonlight never feels like the film of a play in the way that, say, Fences does.

marriage of theatre and cinematography without both being Robert Bresson). It is pure, even exquisite cinema. In some ways a straightforward coming-of-age story in three acts, or chapters, showing us its main character, Chiron, at the age of 10, then 16, and then in his early thirties. Jenkins took the radical decision to cast three different actors: Miami local Alex Hibbert as the boy; Ashton Sanders, rake thin, with a remarkably still and inward presence, as the teenager; and Trevante Rhodes, an extremely powerfully built former sports star as the man. They do not much resemble one another and Jenkins made sure they never met during filming so as not to influence each other, but so powerful is our identification with Chiron, and so challenged is his identity, that not only does this visual disjunction not matter, it works marvels for the film.

At no point do you ever doubt that it is story you are seeing through these different actors and so you give it your faith. Moonlight opens on the street, a tough-looking drug dealer, Juan (Mahershala Ali) drawing up in a big car and exchanging a few words with his sellers. Some children pass by, chasing a nervous boy, the camera shaking wildly as it runs with him, looking for safety in an abandoned flat, True story of the black backroom girls in the American space race REMEMBER that tourist couple who went to the Maldives to take part in a foreign ceremony they wrongly assumed was romantic (they made googly eyes at each other, as their unborn children were dubbed I only ask because, in the land of higher maths, many of us are morons. Calculations feature heavily in this rambunctious biopic about Katherine Johnson (Taraji Henson), the NASA brainiac who helped John Glenn orbit the earth in 1962. Watching her scribble all over a blackboard is a joy.

Can I vouch for the veracity of the sums? What do you think? Hidden Figures is all about finding strength in numbers, especially if an African-American female used to being bullied by territorial whites. It might have been simpler for director Theodore Melfi to concentrate on the prodigious Katherine and simply use her pals flirty engineer, Mary (Janelle Monae) and bolshie computer whizz, Dorothy (Octavia Spencer) as foils. It certainly would have made the film shorter. But Melfi sticks to the truth, highlighting the pioneering work done by all three. The scenes where the trio get together are full of zip, and Spencer in particular is sublime.

Bibliothecaries in the audience are likely to shudder when Dorothy (ejected from the whites-only section of a library) steals a computer- programming manual and justifies it to her son by saying, pay taxes. And taxes paid for everything in that library. You take something already paid Dorothy gets away with daylight robbery thanks to smile. loaded with pleasure, even as it oozes pain. Some critics are aggrieved that white supporting characters, such as engineer Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons), get a rough deal.

Stafford seethes with petty jealousy But he balances out Kevin character, Al Harrison, who pumps out no-frills decency at the same implausible rate. Both Stafford and Harrison are lazy, composite figures but, in this case, two wrongs do make a right. Hidden Figures captures the complex nature of the US workplace. The producer was recently questioned about whether Donald Trump had asked to see the film. Her answer: running time is two hours and seven minutes.

be surprised if he has that kind of attention offering was a huge hit in America. For those interested in civil rights, the film has a jaunty message: sometimes changing things for the better can be as easy as pi. COS Pioneers: from left, Taraji Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae.