Film Review – The Florida Project

While making movies for quite some time, Sean Baker made an impression with 2015’s “Tangerine,” which offered unique atmosphere and vivid characters, and also carried the gimmick of being shot entirely on iPhones, giving it a boost in publicity. Baker’s returned to professional equipment with “The Florida Project,” but he continues on his verite path with the effort, which swaps coasts, moving from Hollywood streets to the sunbaked hotels of Kissimmee, Florida, examining positions of poverty located next door to Walt Disney World. “The Florida Project” is alive, on a perpetual sugar rush of behavior, most of it toxic, but Baker retains a feel for humanity at its most feral and overworked, capturing the sheer fatigue of daily survival in a tourist-laden sweatbox. There are storytelling issues that aren’t resolved, but Baker largely gets by on atmosphere and periodic screen poetry, finding an original location to sort through troubled people.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com