The Florida Project (2017)

This movie is just heartbreaking. The Florida Project is about a distinctly 'Florida' version of 'The Projects', poor people who live in gaudy motels nestled among the tacky souvenir shops and abandoned condo complexes of the Orlando area. Brooklynn Prince is fantastic as Moonie, a happy, precious, and undisciplined girl who lives with her pretty, but vulgar and heavily tattooed mother Halley (Bria Vinaite, also very good) in a $35 a night room at The Magic Castle Motel in Kissimmee, Florida. Halley is consistently unemployed, getting food from friends, and high pressure selling cheap perfumes to tourists in the company of her young daughter. When not with her mother Moonie runs wild and free with other young children in similarly limited circumstances. The most stable figure in her life is Bobby Hicks (William Dafoe in a rare and appreciated nice guy role) as the slightly grizzled by empathetic manager of The Magic Castle, who in a fantastic sequence runs a suspected pedophile off the motel grounds. As Halley becomes more desperate for money she engages in increasingly risky behavior, and harsh realities slowly start to dawn on her young daughter, leading up to what I will only describe as a moving climax. An unexpectedly powerful film which has a lot to say about America's neglected underclass, trapped in destructive cycles both of circumstance and their own making. One of the best movies I've seen this year. ****