The Florida Project

Poverty and poetry, delinquency and deluxe wonder… this child’s-eye view of lives on a knife-edge is terrific.

There’s great integrity to showing life as it is really is, warts and all. But sometimes showing it as it should be has value, too.

The Florida Project won’t let us look away. Nor, given its brilliance, would we want to. Instead, we laugh, we watch silently, and we’re challenged to stop simplifying people's lives so we can offer easy theoretical answers.

Kids have no idea they’re feeling wonder — just feeling it is the thing. That’s the lightning in a bottle captured by director Sean Baker in The Florida Project.

A dazzling mosaic, alert to the ebb and flow of human resilience in the face of everyday crises.

Depending on your perspective, Moonee is either youth incarnate making the most of her circumstances, or Dennis the Menace determined to drive the oldsters stark-raving mad. Her escapades eventually take a turn from boisterously fun-loving to downright dangerous, which kicks the movie’s low simmer into full boil.

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.

A beautiful, moving story. The Florida Project was one of the few movies that transfixed me and stayed with me a long time. The charming Moone tries to make every day an adventurous one taking us through the colourful motels, ice-cream parlours and abandoned homes. Her mother has a fierce love for Moone and tries to make ends meet. Bobby, though wary of Moone and her friends is still protective of them. He too works hard day to day and moves on. This one's a must watch!!

Let me bring some real world into this Hollywood portrayal of it. When I was about 23, me, a college finance graduate from a suburban home got to live in a motel in florida for a couple of months, and hang around the people around this socioeconomic class for a year. It was interesting in a sense that I've met so many people doing strange things - a guy who wrestled alligators at shows (he was my age, his girlfriend while hot was 30), a guy with two parrots who would walk the beach and collect money from tourists for photos, a trio of Brazilian girls who came to learn english, a family from Argentina with two girls being single moms. A polish guy who got a prostitute for his birthday, we were partying before and he was showing me how to choke out a person on me. I blacked out. I went out and when we came back we saw a black pimp sitting on top of him smashing his face in. He ran off seeing us, saying 'I'm gonna get my gun'. Next morning I had to crawl through the window into his room because the owner's daughter was too scared to, to check if he was alive. There aren't many worse feelings than walking through a dark apartment expecting to find a body. Guy was drunk and sleeping and when I asked if he was ok he said 'yeah!' apparently he was too drunk the night before to get it up so he wanted to not pay. This movie is a cliche. Chars are defined and stereotypical. (why can't the friend become more than a waitress? Why is the maintanence man not tougher, he KNOWS these people are **** ups, and he is reminded monthly- my guy would come looking for rent with no remorse, and so did the other landlords I knew) And Americans are still too entitled - this life in america DOES ****, but objectively for a foreigner from a hard life country this life would be a great opportunity.

Usualmente me gustan mucho este tipo de producciones, sobretodo si a24 forma parte de ellas, pero esta vez no fue de mi agrado ni pude terminar de verla, ese grupo de mocosos son realmente insoportables que no dan ganas de seguir viéndolos, es una película bien hecha en todos los sentidos, pero ese aspecto en particular se me hizo tedioso.

A film which can led one into liking because of the kids. The visuals are beautiful and a great performance from Dafoe. Everything else just felt contrived, manipulative & tacky. Glorifying poverty & wayward behavior The ending was predictable.

Tediously annoying to sit thru. This filmmaker seems to think it's his job to whitemansplain what trans latina sex workers and poor homeless women/girls are like, and manages to present them as just a bunch of thoroughly unlikeable **** And he doesn't seem to know what a plot is, thinking that cutting together a bunch of quick snippets of footage is enough.