Hope, Hustle, and Hard Lessons

Read Time:5 Minute, 42 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
The Florida Project: Limited Edition 4K UHD & Blu-ray
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Genre: Drama, Coming-of-Age
Year Released: 2017, Second Sight Films 4K 2025
Runtime: 1h 51m
Director(s): Sean Baker
Writer(s): Sean Baker, Chris Bergoch
Cast: Willem Dafoe, Bria Vinaite, Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, Valeria Cotto
Where to Watch: available October 13, 2025, pre-order your copy here: www.secondsightfilms.co.uk

RAVING REVIEW: The film opens with laughter and kids sprinting under a bright Florida sky as if the world itself is their playground. That energy is the hook: the promise that childhood can generate its own fireworks even when the grown-ups are scrambling to keep the lights on. THE FLORIDA PROJECT understands that contradiction intimately. It sets the thrill of summer freedom right next to the reality of near-homelessness, and refuses to flatten either side of the equation. The result is a compassionate, observed portrait of a community living week to week, where joy is real and consequences don’t wait.

Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch structure the story as a series of days—errands, schemes, games, close calls—so we come to know what life is like at the Magic Castle motel. This choice matters. Instead of pushing a plot, the film builds a lived-in world and lets meanings accumulate. We aren’t asked to “solve” the characters; we’re asked to witness them. That approach could feel meandering in lesser hands. Here, it becomes a pointed thesis about how instability shapes behavior, language, and relationships without turning anyone into a symbol.

Brooklynn Kimberly Prince delivers one of the great performances by a child actor of the decade, mischievous and magnetic without a hint of precociousness. Her Moonee leads a tiny band of explorers through parking lots and tourist traps, mapping terrain like a general, inventing fun out of nothing. Opposite her, Bria Vinaite’s Halley is a lightning rod—funny, abrasive, stubborn, and protective, often in the least constructive ways. The portrayal avoids vilification or sanctification; she’s a young mother with charm and fight who keeps choosing short-term survival tactics that compound long-term damage. Those choices align with the film’s deeper concern: in a system calibrated against you, the options that initially seem available are often the ones that prove most costly in the long run.

Then there’s Willem Dafoe’s Bobby, the manager who keeps this ecosystem from coming apart hour by hour. It’s a deceptively difficult role—authority figure, fixer, guardrail, sometimes the only adult in the building—but he plays it with warmth. Watch how he adjusts his tone depending on who’s in front of him: a firm hand with rule-breakers, gentle with frightened parents, protective when danger drifts onto the property. Crucially, Bobby isn’t a savior. He’s a person doing his job, taking on more emotion than he’s paid for because it’s the right thing to do. That’s the film’s ethos: small acts of decency against a backdrop that doesn’t reward them.

The movie maintains a proximity to the kids’ eye level, which is a storytelling choice rather than a gimmick. Scenes carry the spontaneous messiness of summer afternoons, yet the dramatic moments are strategically placed so that adult reality leaks into the frame at key moments. We catch hints—overheard arguments, a closed door that stays closed too long, a bill posted like a deadline—until those hints thicken into crisis. Baker achieves two things at once: the film is genuinely funny and energetic, and the dread builds in our stomachs because we see what they don’t.

The motel sits in the shadow of a theme-park empire selling happiness by the day, a contrast the film wields without rhetoric. Tourism promises a temporary kingdom; the Magic Castle offers a temporary address. Both run on transactions, but only one is celebrated as a dream come true. The film effectively demonstrates how the kids transform their environment through imagination: a fallen tree becomes a monument to resilience, and a field of abandoned buildings transforms into a labyrinth.

As a character study, the film is generous; as a social portrait, it’s unsparing. It captures transactional economies—the hustles, the favors, the scraped-together payments—that define life on weekly rent. It also captures the emotional economics: the way stress compresses patience, how shame and pride collide, how community forms out of necessity and affection. Baker never scolds or sermonizes. He trusts the audience to connect the dots between policy and personal fallout, between the cheerful veneer of sun-bleached tourist corridors and the invisible labor required to make a living there.

The ending has sparked numerous discussions. Without unpacking specifics, it functions as a rupture in style that honors the perspective the film has prioritized all along. For some, it’s cathartic; for others, it complicates the equilibrium. Either way, it underlines the film’s argument: imagination is not denial—it’s survival, especially for kids who need a door out when none are provided.

Second Sight’s 2025 release adds meaningful context for returning viewers, but what ultimately endures is the film’s core: performances that breathe, a structure that respects lived reality, and a refusal to exploit hardship for easy pathos. It’s funny, tender, and bracingly clear-eyed—a rare blend that leaves you protective of these characters and newly attentive to the worlds we drive past on our way to somewhere else.

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[photo courtesy of SECOND SIGHT FILMS]

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