IndieWire Names 'Moonlight' The Best Movie Of The Past Decade

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight has been named the best movie of the 2010s by IndieWire…
 
Moonlight took home the Oscar for Best Picture at the Academy Awards back in 2017, and now Barry Jenkins’ film has been named the best movie of the past decade by IndieWire. The website ranked its top 100 films of the 2010s, and Moonlight topped the list for its “sprawling look at romantic desire and the emotional hardships of the African-American experience folds its fixations into a profound creative tapestry.”
 
“The movie explores the plight of a young black man across three eras, searching for his place in the world while struggling with his sexual identity under the burdens of class and a broken family,” continues IndieWire’s Eric Kohn. “But much of that arc unfolds through sequences that defy the boundaries of a traditional plot. Instead, the story’s power comes from the gaps between words—and an ongoing battle to find the right ones. It’s an astonishing mood piece about the nature of being marginalized on many levels at once.”
 
Kohn notes how Moonlight, which was released a month before the 2016 US election, “nailed the sense of disconnect in American society well before it became supercharged.”
 
“The tone reflects the mixture of despair and yearning at the center of our troubled times, but hovers above any precise historic moment. Its final image, of young Chiron gazing at the camera from the nighttime beach where his true self will always linger, is nothing short of iconic.”
 
Moonlight wasn’t the only film with LGBTQ themes to make it on the list of top 100 films from the past decade. Pariah was ranked no. 70, Call Me by Your Name was no. 18, and Carol landed in the top 10 at no. 7.