By Ivory ElizabethThis week’s guest critique comes from inspiring filmmaker and writer Ivory Elizabeth, who brings a director’s eye and a critic’s edge to the latest screen sensation.
Just beyond the pastel walls of Walt Disney World, in the lavender-painted strip motels lining Route 192, lives a childhood so bright, so raw, and so unflinching it demands your full attention. Sean Baker’s The Florida Project doesn’t ask for your sympathy, it earns your discomfort. It invites you to witness joy and despair, coexistence and contradiction, in the life of a six-year-old girl who sees magic where the rest of the world sees ruin.
Set in a rundown motel called The Magic Castle, the film follows Moonee (Brooklynn Prince, in an extraordinary debut), a wild, sun-kissed child with a knack for mischief and a resilience that borders on defiance. Her single mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), jobless and spiraling, hustles to make rent each week, selling perfume in parking lots, and doing sex work when desperation peaks. Their life, confined to a $38-per-night room, is both intimate and epic, told not through exposition, but through color, silence, and the space between things.
What makes The Florida Project groundbreaking isn’t just its subject matter, homelessness, neglect, and systemic poverty, but how Baker refuses to sensationalize or reduce it. There are no violins, no sweeping montages, no easy villains; poverty rendered with specificity and humanity. The motel’s manager, Bobby, played with understated compassion by Willem Dafoe, becomes a quiet moral anchor: a man who bends rules without breaking them, constantly negotiating between policy and empathy.
Baker’s signature observational style gives the film the pulse of a documentary without losing its cinematic poetry. Shot on 35mm, the saturated pinks and purples evoke candy-coated fantasies, but the framing tells another story. Behind the vibrant colors, danger looms. Laughter echoes through hallways that hide pain. Children play in the ruins of the American Dream, completely unaware that they are its most innocent casualties.
But this film isn’t about despair; it’s about the audacity of joy. Moonee and her friends embark on daily adventures with nothing but melted ice cream and their imaginations. They’re explorers, pranksters, queens of their castle. It’s in these moments that The Florida Project becomes quietly radical. It insists that even in the most unforgiving conditions, children don’t just survive, they create, they lead, and they demand to be seen.
The ending, an improvised, iPhone-shot escape into Disney World, has divided critics and audiences alike. Is it fantasy? Is it Moonee’s final act of resistance? Either way, it’s unforgettable. The screen bursts with emotion and possibility, then cuts to black. You’re left breathless. Uncertain. A little broken.
And that’s the point.
The Florida Project is one of the most honest films about America made in the last decade. It doesn’t lecture; It doesn’t fix it; It sees. And that alone makes it essential.
PARKER”S CUT The Florida Project film rating
Margery Hannah 
Malea Parker