Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)

Alex R. Hibbert and Mahershala Ali in Moonlight

Adult Chiron Harris: Trevante Rhodes
Teenage Chiron Harris: Ashton Sanders
Child Chiron Harris: Alex R. Hibbert
Adult Kevin Jones: André Holland
Teenage Kevin Jones: Jharrel Jerome
Child Kevin Jones: Jaden Piner
Paula: Naomie Harris
Teresa: Janell Monáe
Juan: Mahershala Ali
Terrel: Patrick Decile

Director: Barry Jenkins
Screenplay: Barry Jenkins
Based on a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney
Cinematography: James Laxton
Production design: Hannah Beachler
Film editing: Joi McMillon, Nat Sanders
Music: Nicholas Britell

Coming-of-age films are the cinematic equivalent of the Bildungsroman, the usually semi-autographical "novel of education" that tracks the formative childhood and adolescent experiences of the protagonist. Dickens, for example, wrote not one but two Bildungsromane: David Copperfield and Great Expectations. In the movies, the classic coming-of-age films include Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, 1955; Aparajito, 1956; The World of Apu, 1959) and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows* (1959). Lately, Richard Linklater has added a distinguished entry to the genre, Boyhood (2014). And now Barry Jenkins adds to the genre with Moonlight, a fine film about growing up black and gay, while deftly avoiding the double pitfall of making his film about being black or gay. There have been plenty of films about growing up black and about growing up gay -- I watched a good film just last night about the latter, André Téchiné's Wild Reeds (1994) --  and much commentary about possessing the dual stigma in a straight and/or white society. But what sets Jenkins's film apart is its avoidance of pop psychology and trite sociology: Moonlight is about being human. You don't need to have grown up in India or France to understand and sympathize with Apu or Antoine, and you don't need to have grown up in the Miami housing projects to sense why Chiron (rhymes with "Tyrone," but with a spelling that suggests the mythical centaur) is so blocked, so stubborn, so silent. Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the play Jenkins adapted for the film, step carefully around the clichés of the genre, especially when it comes to ascribing blame. Juan, the drug runner who finds the young Chiron hiding from bullies in an abandoned crack house and shows him kindness, isn't entirely the heroic figure he might be. Juan becomes the fatherless Chiron's first adult male role model, but he's a poor one even though he's generous and understanding, since Chiron grows up to follow Juan's profession and even imitate some of his showy mannerisms. Paula is a terrible mother, but she doesn't want to be: It's the drugs that Juan sells her that send her skidding off the track she desperately wants to be on. Kevin, Chiron's first (and apparently only) sort-of boyfriend, isn't strong enough to stand up to the taunts of the bully Terrel, so he betrays the teenage Chiron, provoking him to violence. So the film ends on an ambivalent note with the reunion of the adult Chiron and Kevin. Are they strong enough now to provide support to each other, or are their lives going to be haunted by the damaged child that was Chiron, seen in the film's final shot? There is something a little too formulaic about that ending, I think. I'm not entirely convinced, for example, that the handsome, bulked-up, successful drug runner that is the adult Chiron would have remained celibate for so long. But Jenkins has risked much and mostly succeeded -- after all, there's that Oscar -- in crafting a film that doesn't play the blame game or rely on pat explanations and outcomes.

*I'm not including the other four Antoine Doinel films by Truffaut because, like many others, I don't sense a real continuity of character between the Antoine of The 400 Blows and the Antoine of the sequels.

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)

Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later

Jim: Cillian Murphy
Selena: Naomie Harris
Frank: Brendan Gleeson
Major Henry West: Christopher Eccleston
Hannah: Megan Burns
Mark: Noah Huntley
Sgt. Farrell: Stuart McQuarrie
Corporal Mitchell: Ricci Harnett

Director: Danny Boyle
Screenplay: Alex Garland
Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle
Production design: Mark Tildesley

Danny Boyle's science fiction/horror film 28 Days Later was a critical and commercial success, which owes much, I suspect, to its post-apocalyptic theme, capturing a mood prevalent after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Many viewers noted the similarity of the kiosk in the film, covered with notices posted by people searching for lost friends and relatives, to the real ones posted in New York City after the fall of the World Trade Center towers -- a prescient touch on the part of the filmmakers, since the scene was shot before the terrorist attack and its aftermath. It has also been an influential film, helping spark an interest in "zombie"* movies and TV shows. After a prologue that shows how animal-rights activists attacked a research laboratory and unwittingly released a virus that causes uncontrollable rage in its victims and is spread by contact with blood and saliva, the film's protagonist, Jim, wakes up from a coma in a London hospital to discover that he has been abandoned there and that the streets outside are empty. (The premise of someone waking up from a coma to discover a world depopulated by an incurable virus was repeated by the creators of The Walking Dead, first for the graphic novel published in 2003 and later for the TV series that began in 2010.) Jim soon discovers that he is not entirely alone: He is attacked by people infected with the virus and rescued by two who weren't: Selena and Mark. Unfortunately, Mark gets bitten by one of the infected and has to be killed, allowing Selena to explain that the disease takes hold swiftly and is incurable. Selena and Jim then discover two more survivors, Frank and his daughter, Hannah, who have a crank-operated radio that has picked up a signal from survivors north of Manchester calling for others to join them. Frank is infected and killed during their perilous drive northward, and Jim, Selena, and Hannah discover that the survivors are in a well-armed military outpost under the command of Maj. Henry West. It turns out that West has been sending out the signals especially to attract women to service his sex-starved troops, which means not only that Selena and Hannah are in danger of rape but also that Jim is expendable. Before he helps Selena and Hannah escape, Jim also hears the theory of a soldier opposed to West that the virus has not in fact spread worldwide: that it has been contained in other countries and that the island of Britain is quarantined -- a theory that Jim confirms for himself when he sees the contrails of a jet plane flying high overhead. The released film ends happily -- or at least hopefully -- when Jim, Selena, and Hannah, having escaped, construct a giant "HELLO" sign that is spotted by a plane flying reconnaissance over the cottage where they live. It's not the preferred ending of director Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland, who proposed a bleaker resolution of the story that failed with test audiences. Well-directed and -acted, 28 Days Later does what it's designed to do: build suspense and provide interesting characters. It also resonates nicely with our paranoia about pandemic infections in the age of HIV, Ebola, and the annual influenza scare. But it doesn't hold up well under the old test of Questions You're Not Supposed to Ask: like, why has Jim been abandoned, stark naked and comatose, in a hospital? If the hospital was attacked by the infected, why wasn't he attacked? If it was evacuated -- we see a newspaper headline, EVACUATION, at one point -- why was he left behind? How did he survive unattended for 28 days with only an IV drip that would have run out in a few hours? If the rest of the world is safe and only Britain is quarantined, why doesn't Frank's radio pick up international broadcasts? Where are the humanitarian operations like the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders? And so on....

*The infected in 28 Days Later aren't technically zombies. i.e. animated dead people. They're still alive, and they can be killed by ordinary means like shooting or stabbing them.

Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015)

How can there be, by current count, 24 James Bond films? (Not counting the 1967 spoof version of Casino Royale, which had no fewer than five directors, including John Huston.) Why has the series not run its course by now? It has survived regular cast changes, including its central character, who has been played by six different actors: The current Bond, Daniel Craig, had not even been born when the first film in the series, Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962), premiered. Even recurring characters have been recast: M, Miss Moneypenny, and Q have each been played by five actors, and M underwent a change from male to female when Judi Dench took over the role in GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995), though the part reverted to male (Ralph Fiennes) at the end of Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012). Yet the series has retained a reassuring familiarity, even to the point of typically beginning with a spectacular action sequence that almost certainly can't be topped in the remaining parts of the film. In Spectre, Bond is in Mexico City, where he shoots a bad guy, setting off an explosion that has him scrambling to escape from the building's collapsing façade, then chases another bad guy escaping from the rubble onto a helicopter, on which they struggle for control as it careens wildly over the crowds celebrating the Day of the Dead in the Zócalo. Then come the credits and another Bond-film staple, the thematic pop song: This one, "Writing's on the Wall," sung by Sam Smith, who co-wrote it with Jimmy Napes, won an Oscar. And then it's down to the usual business: chastisement by M (Fiennes), gadgets by Q (Ben Whishaw), and pursuit of the villains seeking control of the world. In Spectre there are two: One, Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott), is trying to take over control of intelligence services all over the world, while the other is a familiar figure from earlier Bond films, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), who is in cahoots with Denbigh. (Blofeld, who had been a regular supervillain in the Sean Connery era, was absent from the Bond films after 1983 because of copyright litigation that was settled before Spectre, which takes its title from Blofeld's global criminal organization, was filmed.) There are also vodka martinis, shaken not stirred, to be quaffed, and "Bond girls" to be bedded -- although in recent years, Bond's sex life has become less wildly promiscuous and the women have become more complex characters. In Spectre, one of them, Madeleine Swann, is played by Léa Seydoux, a more than capable actress who sometimes seems to be fighting against the limitations of the role, trying to make Madeleine a more interesting figure than the screenplay allows. So to return to the original question: Why do we still gravitate to the Bond films when there are more novel action-adventures to be had? The series has been so frequently imitated -- Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible movies are virtually indistinguishable in formula from Bond films -- that maybe imitation suggests the answer: We crave the familiar, but we also relish the small surprises when the formula is tweaked. In Spectre, for example, M, Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), and Q all get out of the office and into the field for a change. Spectre is not quite as satisfying an outing as Skyfall, and there are signs of fatigue in Craig's performance, suggesting that his term as Bond has run its course -- though he has reportedly signed on for the next one. But longevity can be its own reward: We have become so comfortable with the formula that it still excites people to speculate about the next James Bond -- Tom Hiddleston? Idris Elba?