Not every artist attains the kind of status that will allow their early works to be revived – or, when revived, greeted with commercial and critical success. This is something of a shame for those of us with a historical mindset who like seeing where an artist has come from and how they have developed.

As its title foretells, Moonlight is a luminous film. It shines light on experiences that may be completely different from our own, drawing us in with utter empathy. Director Barry Jenkins shows his lead character finding his way out of darkness, through pain, to attain a tentative revelation of self-acceptance. Yet this is no direct or glaring light: Jenkins shows himself a master of nuance, working with a script that is light on words but speaks unforgettably in the primal language of cinema itself.

It’s an independent film in the essence of that term, something that makes its progression to the front ranks of this year’s Academy Awards all the more impressive. And how skilfully Moonlight confounds definition by the categories into which it might easily be slotted – as a gay film, or a black film, however much both elements are crucial to its identity.

What’s more important is that Chiron is somehow learning to trust

To achieve something so universal, Jenkins has set his drama in a very particular location, the Liberty City district of Miami. It was where the director himself grew up, as did Tarell Alvin McCraney, the writer from whose original drama treatment In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue the film is adapted. The two did not know each other then: what they did share in youth, however, was the experience of growing up with mothers who had drug addiction issues.

It’s there that we first encounter the film’s hero, 10-year-old Chiron (Alex Hibbert, slight, silent), who’s known as “Little”, the word that gives the first of Moonlight’s three sections its title. The second, which carries the boy’s given name, catches him at 16, now played by Ashton Sanders, gangly and avoiding eye contact. The third, with Chiron a young adult, is titled “Black”, after the moniker he’s now given himself (also an affectionately bestowed nickname he had acquired in the middle episode).It’s not only physical slightness that sets Chiron apart: he’s treated as an outsider by his more aggressive contemporaries for another reason, one which they sense but he himself has not yet registered. The film opens with the latest of what we guess is a series of rejections, but this one ends on a more positive note with Little befriended by Juan (Mahershala Ali). Of Cuban descent, Juan may be a community hard man and drug dealer, but he shows only kindness to this resolutely silent youngster, first feeding him and then taking him home to his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe).

Her home becomes a place of refuge for the troubled Chiron as the circumstances of his home life with mother Paula (Naomie Harris, falling gradually and hauntingly into full crack addiction), as well as that of this “adopted” family change. The other anchor point of Chiron’s world is his friendship with his contemporary Kevin, shown from innocent childhood games through to more loaded adolescent encounters, a bond that will also presage damage as the film progresses.

“At some point you've got to decide who you wanna be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you,” Juan tells the boy at one point, his phrase catching the essence of what Moonlight is about: the shaping, the realisation of the eventual adult character. Juan’s words come shortly after one of the film’s tenderest moments, as he teaches the child to swim, though what’s actually more important is that Chiron is somehow learning to trust. The tragic irony that Ali’s character, the one who shows such concern for Chiron, is also dealing the substances that are bringing his mother down, prompts one of the most poignant moments of the first episode.

The defining moment of the succeeding section also takes place at the sea, as Chiron and Kevin talk on the beach (pictured above, Jharrel Jerome, left, with Ashton Sanders): Chiron once more risks trust, relaxing the barriers of self-protection that he has constructed around himself (“I cry so much sometimes I might turn to drops”, he poignantly reveals). The cruelty is that hurt will again follow revelation, culminating in an act of self-assertion that will change the course of the young man’s life, sending him away from his home environment.

But distance is not the only change that comes with Moonlight’s final part. Trevante Rhodes (an erstwhile professional sportsman himself, physically powerful here, yet so damaged inside) plays the now adult Black, who’s bulked himself up protectively: he’s become a dealer, like his first mentor Juan, with a muscled body to match, teeth ribbed in gold. When Black makes an almost impromptu journey from his new home territory, Atlanta, back to Miami, his whole life comes up for reappraisal. (Pictured above: André Holland, left, with Trevante Rhodes.)

Jenkins’ choice of an elliptical narrative structure, one that registers change rather than spelling it out, is a stroke of genius. It also makes for the sheer freshness of impression that is so powerful in Moonlight, suitable not only for a story anchored in childhood, but also involving a hero who’s at times reticent almost to the point of speechlessness. It's as if the director defines his canvas through spots of colour that coalesce into an image, rather than through any direct stroke of the brush.

Moonlight’s visual sense is highly painterly, too, from the pastel tones of the Liberty City locations (James Laxton’s cinematography catches them with an easy beauty that surely belies their real character) through to the distinct colour orientations of the film’s three parts. There’s a sheer confidence in Nicholas Britell’s score too, melding what we might expect – rap, jukebox melodies – with the grand emotional assertions of Mozart. Comparisons already drawn with the likes of Terrence Malick are not incidental, such is Jenkins’s sheer flair: it's only his second feature, and to draw this quality of performance from his three male leads and supporting players alike is an almost impeccable achievement. Revelatory filmmaking.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Moonlight

The idea of a heavy metal rock band for children might be somewhat lacking in appeal for some. Images of leather and chains, frightening make-up, Anthrax-style roaring into a microphone and satanic lyrics for dear little Jonti, all a bit overwhelming. But in Finland, where hard rock is a way of life, of course there’s a heavy metal group for kids.

There’s a nice pairing to these two character-led documentary films, as reflections on concepts of partnership presented from different ends of the spectrum of innocence and experience. Treating innocence, Someday My Prince Will Come (2005) is the story of 11-year-old Laura-Anne, growing up in an isolated village on the Cumbrian coast, as she begins to engage with the boys around her.

Unimaginable tragedy is given poignant, piquant form in Us/Them. The hour-long performance piece from Belgian theatre company BRONKS has arrived at the National after a much-acclaimed Edinburgh Festival premiere last year. In its intricate weave of frontline semi-reportage and slyly subversive comedy, Dutch-born writer-director Carly Wijs allows a sense of play to inform at every turn this highly physical account of the Beslan school siege in September, 2004.

The homecoming narrative is one of the most elemental ones we know, playing on the most primal human emotions. Stories of separation and reunion have been handed down from time immemorial, varying in their specifics but dominated by their intricate connection to feelings of origin and identity. Lion may be inextricably linked to the details of contemporary life in one sense, but its final scenes have a power that goes far beyond it. In director Garth Davis’s hands the story is told with a sensitivity that avoids the lure of sensationalism.

Adapted from Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, the film is based on a true story. Given that it’s one we may have heard about before watching – and the film’s existence presupposes a certain conclusion – the ending feels less important than the story that has come before (the final mystery actually lies in the title). Set between India and Australia, its action crosses continents – and, no less importantly, the very different ways of lives we see in each – and amply realises Lion’s cinematic potential.

Pawar conveys a wide-eyed, silent wonder as he discovers it all

Davis and his cinematographer Greig Frasier relish wide landscapes, presented through panoramic aerial shots, and Lion opens high above the dry plains of central India, the year 1986. It’s the subsistence world in which five-year-old Saroo (Sunny Pawar, who has real screen panache) lives. His life revolves around his mother (Priyanka Bose), who works as a labourer, and his adored older brother Guddu, who does whatever odd jobs he can. Their very basic existence is grounded in family love, more often conveyed through gesture and image than words, in a film whose first half is spare on dialogue.

Saroo’s eagerness to prove that he too can make a contribution precipitates Lion’s first dislocation. Accompanying Guddu to a nearby town, his elder brother leaves him sleeping on a railway station bench. The next thing we know, Saroo is waking up on an empty train taking him off to an unknown destination, his cries of help to anyone he sees in the passing landscape ignored. If that’s a shock, arrival more than a thousand miles away at Kolkata’s teeming main terminus is an immersion in horror, not least because he speaks only Hindi in this frenzied Bengali conglomeration.

Saroo may slowly find his bearings in this unfamiliar world, but his survival is initially a matter of chance as he’s hassled by police and narrowly escapes the attentions of others whose designs on him are clearly sinister. Even when a chance act of kindness brings him to an orphanage, it’s a far from nurturing environment. We get a sense of the city’s variety, from the station underpasses (lit in anaemic yellows) in which Saroo sleeps on cardboard, through its shrines and streets, to the sheer scale of life around the wide Hooghly river.

When all attempts to resolve the mystery of where he has come from fail, Saroo is chosen for international adoption, and his next removal is to Tasmania, to his new parents Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman, David Wenham). After the aridity and tumult of India, this Australian landscape is an open one, dominated by water, every bit as unfamiliar to Saroo as the refrigerator and television in his new home. Pawar conveys a wide-eyed, silent wonder as he discovers it all, and he’s anchored by Sue's unquestioning presence. There’s nothing glamorous about Kidman (pictured above with Pawar) – even for late-80s Tasmania she seems almost determinedly plain – but she’s translucently sure of herself, emanating a stillness that captures the screen. It’s an assurance that will be tested with the arrival of the couple’s second adopted son, Mantosh, clearly damaged by his experience in a way that Saroo has avoided.

Cut forward to 2008. Saroo, now played by Dev Patel (pictured below) as a lightly bearded, gangly 25-year-old, has come to Melbourne to study. He's winningly confident in this new world of international contacts, which includes Lucy (Rooney Mara), an American student who becomes the film's understated romantic interest, as well as some Indians at the same college. It’s when he visits the latter for a meal that he’s thrown back into a past that he has seemed to blank out completely: it’s a distinctly Proustian moment, the re-association coming with jalebis, the brightly coloured Indian sweets that are lodged deep in his memories. In fact, food – and how you eat it – provides a nicely linked connection in Luke Davies’s screenplay. In childhood Saroo ate with his fingers, then a scene in Kolkata shows him discovering a spoon; part of his formal preparation for going abroad involves laboriously learning table manners, while with his new Indian friends, he’s once again inducted into eating with his fingers.

But it’s something else that he learns from them that propels Lion’s denouement. When Saroo opens up about his past, their mention of Google Earth sets him on a new journey, which will both disrupt his Australian life and (no particular spoiler alert) open a new Indian world. That it’s a piece of new technology that sets him out on his journey home may seem at first anomalous – myths normally being made of things other than GPS coordinates and screen images – but there’s no disputing the reality of Saroo’s story: we see its real-life conclusion in the film’s coda.

To say that Davis doesn’t complicate Lion is meant as a compliment, relying as he does instead on some excellent playing, from Patel and Kidman especially. Its vision of India may not surprise, and be somewhat served up for international tastes, but it doesn’t milk its story. Lion has a cinematic heft, not least in an emotive, often piano-driven score from Dustin O’Halloran and Hausckha that fills the screen, but finally allows the simplicity of its story to speak for itself.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Lion

Richard Adams, who has died at the age of 96, was the high priest of anthropomorphism. Much his most famous and loved novel is his first, Watership Down, published when he was in his early 50s and so instantly successful that he was able to give up his career in the Department of the Environment to write full time. Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig, the floppy-eared freedom-fighting heroes of Watership Down, kept him in comfort for the rest of his life.

Bach: Christmas Oratorio Dunedin Consort/John Butt (Linn)

For those of you who aren’t parents, or a member of theartsdesk’s burgeoning under-5 readership, Mr Tumble is the comic creation of Justin Fletcher a children’s entertainer and TV presenter. Among his CV highlights is providing the voice of Jake, one of the the Noughties, pre-school phenomenon the Tweenies, and a character who made Joe Pasquale sound like Richard Burton after a packet of woodbines and half a bottle of decent Scotch.

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