Camilla Long’s 3* review of Moonlight doesn’t make her a racist

I have a bone to pick with Camilla Long – a colleague of mine at the Sunday Times, where she is the film reviewer. She gave five stars to a stop-motion animation film called Anomalisa a year or so back and I went to see it on her journalistic recommendation. Oh, and also cos it had Jennifer Jason Leigh voicing one part, the most underrated actress of the last thirty years. It was godawful; pretentious, badly scripted, shallow and dull. I thought about suing Camilla for liking a film I had not liked and thus making me endure two hours of misery. Or maybe outing her as a racist. Why? Oh, no reason. You don’t need a reason these days.

She’s been outed as a racist by the idiotic leftie website The Canary. Because she gave only three stars to a film called Moonlight, when the Guardian gave it five stars. It’s a film about the ‘plight’ of LGBT black people (yep, I know….. hurry up and get your tickets). Here’s the paragraph of her review which offended:

The received wisdom on Moonlight, a film about gay love in the black ghetto, is that it is ‘necessary’ and ‘important’. It is an ‘urgent’ and ‘relevant’ examination of forbidden attraction in a world, ‘the streets’, that is largely hostile to gay men.

Only, relevant to whom? Certainly not the audience. Most will be straight, white, middle class. Nor is it particularly ‘urgent’: the story has been told countless times, against countless backdrops.

I haven’t seen the film. Maybe I should. It can’t be worse than Anomalisa. But that paragraph or two above seems to me to hit the nail on the head, in general terms – the film has been championed not because it is a good film, but because it accords with the sensibilities of the stupid white left.