Oscar-nominated filmmaker and journalist David France follows his searing AIDS activism documentary, How to Survive a Plague, and the poignant The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, with a deeply unsettling look at Chechnya’s anti-LGBTQ purge. Inspired by Masha Gessen's The New Yorker article Forbidden Letters: The Gay Men Who Fled Chechnya’s Purge, Welcome... Continue Reading →
With their feature film debut, director Andrew Patterson and his co-writer Craig W. Sanger have made an idiosyncratic splash with the micro budget yet winning sci-fi mystery, The Vast Of Night. Set in 1950s small town New Mexico, the film begins with a Twilight Zone style introduction as we push in on an old fashioned... Continue Reading →
Dawn Porter’s feature length documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble is both an up close and personal biographical study of the activist and longstanding public servant, as well as a compelling examination of the history of the Civil Rights movement, through Lewis’ vital role in it. What results is a fascinating and inspiring chronicle of an extraordinary life... Continue Reading →
Let the Eurovision Song Contest begin! The global health crisis might have put a stop to those immortal words being enthusiastically declared this year, with the 65th Eurovision Song Contest postponed until 2021, but fans and newcomers alike will nevertheless get to experience a version of the musical campfest vicariously through this genuinely feel-good comedy... Continue Reading →
Yesterday’s landmark Supreme Court decision on LGBTQ protections in the workplace is reason for us to breathe a sigh of relief and celebrate. It also reminds us of the need for more mainstream LGBTQ+ representation as we continue the fight for full equality and societal acceptance. As Sam Feder’s Netflix documentary Disclosure released this Friday... Continue Reading →
Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic — boy, am I tired of starting articles with those words — film festivals around the world are finding new methods of distributing movies to fans. An unexpected benefit of the situation is that festivals, which are by their very nature dependent on geography, open themselves up to film fans... Continue Reading →
Chip Gutchell feels dead inside. An office IT drone who goes through the motions with his wife, he seems sapped of joy until one day at a scheduled prostate exam, he discovers he likes things stuck up his butt. He starts out innocently enough, inserting small objects, but when larger, breathing things go missing in... Continue Reading →
Director Sam Feder’s Disclosure, which world premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is an ambitious, ground-breaking and nuanced examination of over one hundred years of trans representation on screen. Iconic and lesser known scenes from film and television are placed in context by a line-up of trans trailblazers including the iconic Laverne Cox, who... Continue Reading →
Bonnie and Clyde narratives are a dime a dozen. There are plenty of movies actually about the bankrobbing outlaw couple themselves — Bonnie & Clyde (1967), for example, and Netflix's 2019 film The Highwaymen — and there are also plenty simply inspired by the idea of a madly-in-love guy and gal on the run from... Continue Reading →
Spike Lee's most recent feature film, BlacKkKlansman, which finally won the filmmaker an overdue competitive Oscar, was set in the 1970s but had a biting, traumatizing epilogue that brought the film into the present day, with Trump's 'very fine people on both sides' speech and footage of Heather Heyer's murder in Charlottesville. Reminding us that... Continue Reading →
