The Florida Project

Six-year-old Moonee lives with her young single mother Halley at Magic Castle Inn & Suites, a budget motel in Kissimmee, Florida, near Walt Disney World. She spends most of her summer days unsupervised and making mischief with her downstairs neighbor Scooty, who Halley is supposed to watch while his mother works at a diner, and Dicky, who lives at the nearby Futureland Inn. After Stacy, a new resident at Futureland, catches the trio spitting on her car, Dicky is grounded for a week, and Moonee and Scooty meet and befriend Stacy's granddaughter Jancey, who lives with Stacy, when Stacy makes them clean up their mess.

Halley recently lost her job as an exotic dancer, which affects her eligibility for TANF benefits, and she relies on food that Scooty's mother, her friend Ashley, gets from work. Moonee and Scooty show Jancey around and teach her things like how to get free ice cream by begging and where to get the best view of a woman who sunbathes topless by Magic Castle's pool. The children regularly inconvenience Bobby, the manager of Magic Castle, such as when they shut off the motel's power, but he remains protective of them.

The similarity of Magic Castle's name to Disney World's Magic Kingdom occasionally causes wealthy people to accidentally book rooms, but most of the residents do not have much money, and a church regularly delivers donated food. Halley avoids becoming homeless by beginning to sell knockoff perfume to tourists in the parking lots of nice hotels. Bobby's duties at Magic Castle include preparing expense reports, ejecting drug dealers, and doing repairs, and he sometimes enlists the help of his son, with whom he has a tenuous relationship. One day, while painting, he notices a strange man hanging around a group of children and ejects him from the property.

Scooty finds a lighter in a box that Dicky's family left behind when they moved away, and he, Moonee, and Jancey start a fire at an abandoned condominium complex. Ashley gets the truth out of him, after which she forbids him from hanging out with Moonee or Jancey and stops talking to Halley. When Halley learns this, she goes to the diner where Ashley works and makes a scene. Moonee and Jancey continue to play together and become best friends.

Without the free food from Ashley, and with security guards beginning to bother her at the hotels, Halley's financial situation declines even further. When she and Moonee move out of Magic Castle for the mandated 24 hours that month (so as not to establish residency), they discover new owners at the motel they usually go to have raised the rates, so they instead spend the night with Stacey. Aware of this, Bobby is suspicious when Halley finally pays for her room, and it turns out she has begun to solicit sex work online, keeping Moonee in the bathroom with loud music when she has a client. She steals a client's Disney World resort passes to scalp them, and the man returns to demand them back. Bobby scares him off, but says Halley's guests now have to check in at the front desk. Desperate, she apologizes to Ashley for whatever Moonee did and asks for help with rent, but Ashley says Halley should have plenty of money, since she is prostituting herself. In front of Scooty, Halley punches Ashley in the face repeatedly and storms off.

Investigators from the DCF show up and question Halley and Moonee separately about their lifestyle. Halley has Moonee help clean their room and gives away her weed in anticipation of another visit. They go to a fancy hotel and have an extravagant meal, which Halley charges to a guest's room, and when they return to Magic Castle, the investigators, having found evidence Halley is doing sex work, are waiting with two police officers to take Moonee into foster care while they finish their inquiry. Not really understanding what is happening, Moonee asks to say goodbye to Scooty, who lets slip that she is going to a new family. She becomes agitated and runs away to bid Jancey goodbye, and Jancey, seeing her friend's distress, grabs Moonee's hand and escapes with her to Magic Kingdom.

Willem Dafoe's performance garnered widespread critical acclaim and earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor

The film had its world premiere on May 22, 2017, in the Directors Fortnight section of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival,[18][19] and A24 acquired the U.S. distribution rights shortly thereafter.[20] Its limited theatrical release in the U.S. began on October 6, 2017.[21] Lionsgate released the film on Blu-ray, DVD, and download.

The Florida Project received critical acclaim upon its release, with particular praise given to the direction and the performances of Dafoe, Prince, and Vinaite. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, it has an approval rating of 96% based on 320 reviews, with a weighted average score of 8.8/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "The Florida Project offers a colorfully empathetic look at an underrepresented part of the population that proves absorbing even as it raises sobering questions about modern America."[22] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 92 out of 100 based on reviews from 44 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[23]

Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote that "Dafoe delivers his finest performance in recent memory, bringing to levelheaded, unsanctimonious life a character who offers a glimmer of hope and caring within a world markedly short on both."[24] Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "It's film that'll make you wince at times, and you'll most likely not want to see twice, but seeing it once is an experience you'll not soon forget."[25]

• The Florida Project at IMDb