“If you told me you could make a modern Christmas classic largely set outside a doughnut shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, centered on transgender prostitutes and shot on iPhones, I wouldn’t have believed you,” begins Ben Kenigsberg at RogerEbert.com. “But Sean Baker follows that unlikely 2015 triumph, Tangerine, with The Florida Project, another raucous portrait of a community on the margins.” It’s “set in and around the Magic Castle Motel, a seedy motor lodge on the outskirts of Disney World. The motel's residents live in chronic semi-homelessness in the shadow of what—as Baker noted at the Q&A—is supposed to be the ‘most magical place on earth.’ . . . For six-year-old Moonee (the exuberant Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, in a star-making, movie-stealing performance), the motel and its surroundings are an idyllic and largely consequence-free summer playland.”
“Ken Loach and Tex Avery never had a chance to collaborate on a film together, but the manic, high-energy and ultimately heartbreaking social drama The Florida Project more than suffices,” writes Jordan Hoffman for the Guardian. “Baker (working once again with co-screenwriter Chris Bergoch), has lost none of his fire and exuberance working with a larger budget and some well-known cast members. Indeed, Willem Dafoe, as the reluctant father-figure manager at the Orlando motel where this movie is set, gives one of the best film performances of his entire career.”
“The film adheres to the flighty, anarchic whims of its protagonists, this time tracking them in gorgeous 35mm shot by Alexis Zabe, whose day-glo Florida facades and pastel clouds fizz off the screen,” writes Emily Yoshida at Vulture. “As Moonee’s mother (played with acerbic brio by Bria Vinaite) hits harder times, the clouds roll in, and the camera gets even closer to its subjects, as if to reveal worries we couldn’t see at a distance. But the film’s finale, a more effective dream ballet than anything nominated for an Oscar this year, revisits Baker’s digital-guerrilla style in a stunning escape to the Magic Kingdom itself. It’s manic and beautiful, and a perfect, if impossible resolution to Moonee’s impossible situation.”
“It feels like his most epic and profoundly affecting film to date,” writes David Jenkins at Little White Lies. “And it’s not that it looks expensive or that the story is broader in scope than usual. More that it offers a trenchant and compassionate political statement about the condition of working class America without once resorting to bald point making or cliché.”
And Screen’s Tim Grierson assures us that “this isn’t a cynical example of so-called ‘poverty porn.’”
“Baker indulges just a little too much time shooting his young hyperactive actors in off-key locations and perhaps not enough on their character development or narrative arcs,” suggests Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage.
But for Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, The Florida Project is “rooted in that transcendent moment of childhood where almost anything you encounter—a field of weeds, an abandoned house—is tinged with wonder.”
And it “further cements Baker’s status as one of the most innovative American directors working today,” writes IndieWire’s Eric Kohn, “but he’s also an essential advocate for the stories this country often doesn’t get to see.”
Guy Lodge opens his interview with Baker for Variety by congratulating him on his first Cannes selection. “The lineup this year is so exciting for a cinephile, especially in Directors’ Fortnight. I actually feel like I’m living a weird little dream, because I’m in the same section as Abel Ferrara and Bruno Dumont—both directors who had an influence on this particular film.”
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from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2rwaIUQ
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