So this is a coming-of-age movie, quite literally — it features the protagonist as a child, a teen, and an adult, grappling with his place in the world, and his relationships to his family and the people around him. I’m not going to describe the plot more than that, because spoilers.

The movie is just really well-made; in particular, it’s a showcase of brilliant acting, the way that the three people playing Chiron at different ages are able to make him so consistently the same person throughout; the way that both as an adult and as a teen, he shifts from confidence to a kind of nervous shyness.

What’s really weird about this movie is that it won an Oscar. In one sense that’s not weird at all — it totally deserves it, right — but this isn’t just the kind of movie that the Oscar usually goes to. Not just because it’s a black movie, but because it’s such a quiet character-driven thing. When I think of Oscar movies, I think of… well, La La Land type things.

This is on Amazon Prime, and definitely worth watching if you haven’t seen it already.