Barry Jenkins

Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight is already being called one of the best movies of the year, and not without reason. It’s a visual feast quaking with beauty and sadness, a hushed poem of pain and romance, and a piece of filmmaking that feels more alive . But most people will also be talking about Moonlight for its actors, and its triads of shattering, magnetic performances.

A raw, exquisite portrait of young black masculinity, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight follows one life through three stages to tell a story of repressed desires and internalized suffering. Across three chapters we watch Chiron, a young South Florida boy, grow into a teen and later into a nearly unrecognizable man, as he seeks to understand the various shades of his identity.

ScreenCrush’s Matt Singer and Erin Whitney are back from the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. You can read all of their coverage so far here, but if you want the digest version, they compiled this list of some of the fest’s highlights: the best performances, the biggest surprises, and the worst disappointments. What are the movies people are going to be talking about this fall? These. (Except the ones they didn’t like, of course.)

Eight years ago, a young filmmaker burst onto the scene with an exciting film called Medicine for Melancholy, about a day in the lives of two San Franciscans. Starring Wyatt Cenac, the movie did well on the arthouse circuit and established its director, Barry Jenkins, as an artist to watch. But in the eight years since, Jenkins has remained relatively quiet. He’s worked on some shorts, but Medicine for Melancholy never got a followup until now.