15 Best Original Movie Characters Of 2016

In 2014, Richard Linklater released Boyhood, a 12 year long passion project whose stated goal was to capture the growth and development of a young boy from the ages of 8 to 20. Barry Jenkins' indie feature Moonlight does a very similar thing with its central character Chiron, a man of unspoken depth growing up in a low-income section of Miami, Florida.

Moonlight portrays Chiron at three different stages of his life: Once as a child, once as a teenager, and finally as a grown man dealing drugs in Atlanta. Each of the three different actors playing Chrion gives us a new angle on his life, until we have a complete picture of this man as an adult. Not only does the film deconstruct a common archetype - the black drug dealer is an uncomfortable racial stereotype in American films - but it shows us step by step how this man's upbringing brought him to where he was, all while subverting our expectations with his hidden depths.

Never a particularly talkative person, Chiron commands every scene he's in, suggesting depth far beyond the words he speaks. As we grow to understand him over the course of the film, we realize how familiar we've grown with this terse and outwardly abrasive man. Everything about him - his insecurities, his sexuality, and his loneliness - are revealed piece by piece until we know him better than any other movie character of 2016.