Moonlight turns 10 this year. Barry Jenkins' film follows a boy growing up in Miami across three chapters of his life, tracing how he learns to protect himself long before he learns how to be known by anyone.
Ten years on, it is still most famous to casual audiences for what happened after it won: presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope on stage, read out La La Land as Best Picture, and the La La Land team was already mid speech when producers stepped in to correct the record and confirm Moonlight as the actual winner.
That mixup has outlived plenty of actual memories of the film itself, which is a shame, because Moonlight does not need the asterisk. It holds a 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and was one of the most acclaimed films of the decade well before anyone misread an envelope.
Trevante Rhodes, Andre Holland, and Naomie Harris anchor a cast that treats every silence as deliberately as every line of dialogue, which is part of why the film rewards a rewatch even once you already know where it ends up.
Ten years later, Moonlight is still worth returning to on its own terms, Oscars trivia aside.
