“It’s perfect,” remarked a friend of mine, a 21-year-old who identifies as a black and queer man, just after seeing Barry Jenkins’s new film “Moonlight.” He had trouble even putting into words one core tenant that made the film so effectual; what he came to, after minutes of stammering about the unique beauty of each of its parts, was that the movie is so incredibly important for young black men. It’s a movie he really could’ve used growing up.

New Yorker critic Hilton Als had a very similar reaction to “Moonlight” as a gay black man. “Did I ever imagine,” his critique begins, “during my anxious, closeted childhood, that I’d live long enough to see a movie like ‘Moonlight,’ Barry Jenkins’s brilliant, achingly alive new work about black queerness?” Growing up in “the era of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and AIDS,” Als suspects no one like him could’ve expected to see “a version of his life told onscreen with such knowledge, unpredictability, and grace.” Als reveals his perspective to readers right off the bat, letting them know that reviewing “Moonlight” was not like reviewing any old movie; this one struck him hard.

Positioning his arguments within this framework fulfills Kant’s assertion, as quoted by A. O. Scott, that “the judgment of taste must involve a claim to…subjective universality.” In providing the contextual information that the reader needs as a basis of knowledge, Als draws on his own experience to deepen our understanding of the world in which the film takes place — and because he’s told us his background (and because he’s a regular critic for The New Yorker), we trust him.

Als describes one of the primary characters, Juan, as “intelligent enough to know that he’s expendable, that real power doesn’t belong to men like him,” and notes that in a particular scene, Juan cannot take his eyes off the street because “he can’t afford to; this situation, any situation, could be changed in an instant by a gun or a knife.” Als speaks authoritatively about the life of a black man, the intricacies of which he knows all too well, in beautifully argumentative prose that keeps the reader engaged. He makes the use of imaginative metaphors (“James Laxton [films] the car as if it were a kind of enclosed throne”) and punchy, assertive sentences: “I still don’t know how Jenkins got this flick made. But he did. And it changes everything.”

From a more theoretical angle, Als successfully writes the kind of artful criticism that Susan Sontag called for, “[dissolving] considerations of content into those of form.” One of many examples of this technique comes as Als dives deeper into the main character’s experience of blackness: “This moment of confusion—about internalized self-hatred and the affection of naming—is unlike anything that’s been put onscreen before; it shows what freedom and pain can look like, all in one frame.” Read with Sontag’s Against Interpretation in mind, Als emerges as one triumphant critic who can give an art form the respect it deserves on all fronts of a critique — on its technical might, aesthetic considerations, and significance within a larger canon.

Richard Brody, an online columnist at The New Yorker, uses a wholly different style of writing in his criticism of “Moonlight.” Brody speaks to the followers of his blog in pretentiously abstract terms, like when he states that “Jenkins’s sense of a societal atmosphere is inseparable from his cinematic sense of an actual, even meteorological atmosphere.” This more academic style could be perceived as a way Brody attempts to make up for a lack of expertise on the movie’s central themes. When judged against Daniel Mendelsohn’s equation defining good critique — “KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT” — Brody lacks the first-hand knowledge of living as a gay black man on which Als can lean; therefore, he must compensate with fancy language and intellectual rambling.

Brody also makes up for this discrepancy in his “Moonlight” critique with a slight turn toward an egotistical commentary on his own critical methods in the following quote: “As a reminder of responsibility, of an artist’s awareness that creation isn’t merely a matter of telling a story but of seeing the world and depicting it truthfully, [the concept of representation is] a blessing; as a critical practice of abstraction that pulls movies away from what’s onscreen and toward generalities, it’s a curse.” He goes on to say that films like this one “build their mode of criticism into their very substance” — a mark of a great movie, according to Brody.

Maybe I’m being a bit too hard on Brody. Both critics had a fairly easy job in writing about what is lauded as the best movie of 2016 (though, to be fair, this title was probably not as solidified until their writings on it). Neither piece has to tackle polite criticism of a work into which dozens of people have poured their hearts and souls. Brody gives Jenkins a bit of a harder time, stating twice within the first two paragraphs of his critique that he was not a fan of Jenkins’s first movie, “Medicine.” Is Brody attempting to flex his critical muscles, bashing an old work of the artist in order to feel more justified of his high praise of the new film? Or is Als the one cutting some corners in neglecting to find any fault with the artist, or even to mention any less impressive, older works?

To my friend who thought so highly of the film, I recommended Als’s piece. I suspect he will find solace and solidarity in reading about someone else’s similarly personal experience of the film. I’m happy Brody loved it, if only because it may encourage other white Americans to go out and see it, hopefully in an effort to expand their understanding of the black experience. But it means much more to me, and I’m sure to Jenkins as well, that Hilton Als saw in Chiron a pure and accurate reflection of what it means to be a gay black man in the United States of America. That’s the true mark of an effective piece of art.