15 Essential Movies For LGBT* Pride Month
1. Moonlight
Barry Jenkins took an eight-year break from filmmaking following on from his debut film, 2008's Medicine For Melancholy, returning in 2016 and delivering one of the best films of the year and a key recent film in the pantheon of LGBT* cinema, Moonlight.
Moonlight is one of those rare movies which manages to explore a range of complex and delicate subjects without ever failing to do any of them justice. From black identity to masculinity and sexuality, Jenkins straddles the themes and bridges them together by showing his protagonist, Chiron, developing throughout childhood and through adolescence into adulthood.
It helps that the character is played by such capable performers - a different actor portrays Chiron at each point in his life - but there's never a sense that we're watching different people, and Jenkins handles the continuity of the character's development with the same assurance as his mastery of the times and places in which he moves.
Like most of the best LGBT* cinema - and, indeed, cinema in its totality - Moonlight is crafted from the incidental aspects of life, which accumulate to become something profound and significant.