The Florida Project

By Diana Beechener

Six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince: Robo-Dog: Airborne) is a happy girl. She lives at the Magic Castle motel with her mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite in her screen debut) and spends her days exploring along Florida highways. The hotel has become temporary housing for poverty-stricken families, and Moonee watches fights, crimes and life dramas with fascination.

The girl knows how to scam ice cream from strangers, snatch prime donation items from the church van and help her mom sell perfume to tourists. She spits on cars, throws rocks through windows of abandoned houses and plays with the other kids who live at the motels on this desolate stretch of highway.

As Moonee wanders, her mother, an out-of-work exotic dancer with a volatile personality, spends her days smoking pot and watching TV. Out of money and facing eviction, Halley turns to prostitution, leaving Mooney in the bathtub as she sees clients.

Overseeing the chaos at the Magic Castle motel is harried manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe: The Great Wall). He holds the ramshackle motel together physically and emotionally, keeping up repairs and watching over the children when he can.

Will reality crush Moonee as it did her mother?

Touching and beautifully shot, The Florida Project takes a gorgeous look at the relentless positivity of childhood. Director Sean Baker (Tangerine) is a master of hyper-real filmmaking, shooting his movies in a documentary style that makes them feel vital. He’s also good at exploring the children’s perspective, keeping the camera with Moonee to capture her joy and wonder at the world around her.

It’s a testament to Baker’s power as a filmmaker that we can believe in Moonee’s delight while understanding that she’s in jeopardy.

As Moonee, Prince is the heart of the film. She gives an admirable and endearing emotional range to this precocious, boisterous child, who happily parrots phrases learned from adults and acts sexy like her mother. We’re charmed by her exuberance even as we cringe at how dire her home life has become.

Tragic and beautiful, The Florida Project is a rare piece of filmmaking.

Great Drama • R • 115 mins.

New this Week

Jigsaw

With bodies piling up, the police think of serial killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) — who has been dead for 10 years.

Every Halloween, the Saw series produces another torture porn film for viewers who crave gore. For fans of bloody deaths, ridiculous violence and faux philosophical reasoning behind the orgiastic worship of grizzly mutilations, this movie will not disappoint. If you’ve never seen a Saw film, count yourself lucky and don’t start now.

Prospects: Bleak • R • 91 mins.

Suburbicon

A home invasion and murder spiral a quiet suburban community into chaos. Gardner (Matt Damon) keeps up the façade as he falls into a conspiracy of violence. Meanwhile, the first black family to move into the white suburbicon development is mercilessly harassed in a story inspired by historic race riots in Pennsylvania.

With Damon, George Clooney as director and the Coen brothers as contributing writers, Suburbicon has star power. But combining zany humor with racial terror is a hard balancing act, and Clooney lacks the deft comic touch.

Prospects: Dim • R • 104 mins.

Thank You for Your Service

Adam Schumann (Miles Teller) returns from war physically unharmed. But he is not ready for normal life.

He has flashbacks, can’t connect with people and refuses to talk to his wife about the problems he’s experiencing.

Can Adam and his family find a new normal after being shaken by an extraordinary experience?

Films about soldiers reintegrating into society are crowd-pleasers. A capable actor, Teller should be able to do the part justice. But can director Jason Hall do justice to the reality?

Prospects: Flickering • R • 108 mins.