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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Retro Review by Ash Baker
Before embarking on the journey to Divine’s pepto-bismol-pink mobile home, Cookie says to her employers, “I may have to degrade myself.” This is the mindset I believe everyone should take into watching Pink Flamingos, a movie that asks its audience to laugh at such horrors as incest, kidnapping, murder, cannibalism, and many other acts of unapologetic filth.
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Taron Egerton stars as Elton John in Dexter Fletcher’s biopic of the queer pop icon
Review by Logan Kenny
Rocketman has the same energy as your local bank putting up a rainbow flag outside its branch for Pride Month. It is all facade, all meaningless. I hope one day, audiences realise that they deserve more than this.
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Review by Zach Dennis
Wild Nights with Emily never outright makes the assertion that Dickinson’s supposed lesbian relationship was the stone-chiseled truth. While it presents evidence to the claim, the bigger exploration it poses to the audience is our outright acceptance to what we perceive as historical text.
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Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever star in director Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart
Review by Paige Taylor
I’m not joking when I tell you I am positively vibrating with giddy emotion over this movie. The experience of watching it was a fucking thrill. Once the laughter started, the room slowly transformed into sheer amusement-induced delirium and that energy sustained itself for the rest of the runtime. When I left I felt like I was getting back on the school bus after spending a field trip secretly drinking with all my friends.
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Olivia Coleman stars in director Yorgot Lanthimos’s The Favourite
Review by Diana Rogers
Sometimes the women don't look fabulous while they're going about the business of being complicated and fascinating. Sometimes they're middle aged and overweight, un-corseted, gout-ridden and wearing eye makeup that makes them look like a badger. Some of the most celebrated male roles are those that revel in their characters' flaws, their actual human-ness. It shouldn't be so uncommon for women to feature in similar parts, yet somehow it still feels revolutionary, because it happens far too infrequently.
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Rami Malek stars as Freddie Mercury in director Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody
Review by Logan Kenny
This movie should have been something more, something uplifting and beautiful, but it is not, and all we can do is speak out about its problems together, to not stay silent.
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Rhys Fehrenbacher stars as J in director Anahita Ghazvinizadeh’s They
Retro Review by Ash Baker
I would love to have seen a movie about the struggle a young trans/non-binary person faces when they realize their body doesn’t necessarily match their mind. I would love to have seen a movie about how the world behaves in binaries even when some of us don’t fit into them—democrat or republican, gay or straight, male or female, Friends or Seinfeld.
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Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan star in director Dominic Cooke's On Chesil Beach
Review by Lydia Creech
Asexual audiences probably already know not to expect better, but I worry the general public will walk away thinking this scenario was a balanced argument and portrayal of an asexual character attempting to navigate (or not) a sexual relationship.
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Rebecca Spence and Jessie Pinnick in Princess Cyd
Review by Paige Taylor
Princess Cyd isn’t told in the story structure we’re comfortable with. It has loose ends and unanswered questions and feels more like a chapter than an entire story. But like happiness, and like fulfillment, cinema doesn’t have to stick to one recipe.
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Alex Hippert stars as "Little" in director Barry Jenkins's Moonlight
Personal Essay by Courtney Anderson
I have to be honest and say that I don’t believe in total “universality” of films, especially not Moonlight. Chiron’s narrative is one that is so often ignored that the idea that “everyone” can find themselves in him confuses me. But I know Chiron.
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Personal Essay by John McAmis
It’s a harsh truth, but any human who testifies that they enjoy being alone is lying.
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Min-hee Kim and Kim Tae-ri play a Japanese heiress and a pickpocket hired as her handmaiden in Director Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden
Review / Personal Essay by Paige Taylor
Warning: Review contains spoilers
This was the sapphic delight I've wished for for so long.
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Tracy Camilla Johns stars in director Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It
Retro Review by Andrew Swafford
She’s Gotta Have It is a raw and messy masterpiece that features a non-conventional storytelling structure, sensual cinematography, and an overall perspective on sexual politics that still feels like a shock to the system thirty years later.
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