The Florida Project | Review - Child's eye view of a hard-knock life

Florida Project Bria Vinaite Brooklyn Kimberly Prince — (Image credit: Spirit Entertainment)

Welcome to a magical kingdom.

Fizzing with vitality, brimful of empathy and insight, this terrific movie immerses us in the lives of an exuberantly mischievous six-year-old girl and her reckless, feckless, floridly tattooed single mother, residents of a tatty Florida motel in the shadow of Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom.

Sean Baker, maker of 2015’s eye-popping transgender drama Tangerine, conveys the playful exuberance of childhood as his rascally young heroine Moonee and her friends get up to all manner of impudent escapades. But he also lets us see the heart-breaking reality of their hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth lives.

Amid a largely untried cast, Brooklyn Kimberly Prince is astonishingly good as Moonee, as is first-time actress Bria Vinaite (discovered by Baker on Instagram) as her mother, while Willem Dafoe is warm and touching as the motel’s kindhearted manager.

Certificate 15. Runtime 111 mins. Director Sean Baker

The Florida Project is available on Digital, and on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital from 12 March from Altitude Film Distribution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwQ-NH1rRT4

A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.