The Florida Project
Directed by Sean Baker Sean Baker’s new feature is “one of the most infectious and thrillingly alive portraits of childhood I’ve ever seen,” said Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. In a cut-rate motel outside Disney World, a 6-year-old girl named Moonee uses her mother’s benign neglect to live each day as an adventure. As Moonee cons tourists out of ice cream money and enlists her friends in various mischief, the youngster who fills the role, Brooklynn Prince, “goes so far beyond the precocious mugging that often passes for child acting that it all but defies that classification.” But Baker, who made 2015’s acclaimed Tangerine, has almost too much sympathy for Moonee and her 22-yearold mom, treating the latter’s eventual turn to prostitution as no great threat to Moonee’s “borderline idyllic” experience of poverty, said Richard Brody in NewYorker.com. “For all its careful observation,” The Florida Project proves “as emotionally inauthentic” as Disney World itself. But the audience is forever aware that Moonee is a child at risk, even with a “never better” Willem Dafoe on hand as a surrogate father figure and Baker bent on uplift, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. “This movie accomplishes something almost miraculous—two things, actually. It casts a spell and tells the truth.”