Adèle Haenel and Pauline Acquart star in director Céline Sciamma’s debut Water Lilies
Retro Review / Personal Essay by Paige Taylor
I wish I could sit teenagers down and give them all the wisdom I learned the hard way, answer all the questions they’re too embarrassed to say out loud, and assure them that their road to adulthood might feel shitty and weird but that is 100% expected and normal. There is beauty in this adventure too. Céline Sciamma clearly feels the same way.
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Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie star in director Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Retro Review by Logan Kenny
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is maybe the only gay tragedy I’ve seen that doesn’t feel painful, that doesn’t cause a furious ache in my soul whenever I reflect on how many of us are dead. It’s the movie that reminds me that beyond the closet and the tragedy of loss, that there are millions of stories that I will never hear of people that truly loved each other.
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Adepero Oduye and Aasha Davis star in director Dee Rees’s Pariah
Retro Review by Courtney Anderson
Pariah is of the few coming-of-age stories that centers a Black girl, and one of the very few coming-of-age stories that centers a queer person. Pariah ended up being a godsend for me.
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Colin Firth and Jon Kortajarena in director Tom Ford’s A Single Man
Retro Review by Ash Baker
While I’m certainly not advocating for narratives that teeter on dangerous clichés, I think it would be dishonest if the LGBT community abandoned “sad” movies. The LGBT community is as diverse as any other, and while we are proud and happy, we are also complex human beings who are capable of sadness, fear, anger, and doubt. I’m not afraid of “sad” LGBT movies; I just want to know that, in the end, we’ll be okay.
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