Narrated by Laverne Cox, it’s an essential way to learn about what film history books often ignore.Īlia Shawkat remains one of the most compelling and unexpected stars, with the bisexual Arrested Development breakout having built a career in wicked and warped indie film and television. Whether it’s subtextual or in-your-face, trans people have always been on screen, although not always in ways that look good in 2021. Replicating the style of 1990s classic The Celluloid Closet, this lauded and much-needed cinematic history lesson takes viewers through the history of transgender representation on screen. Johnson up to her rightful place as an icon.
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Shunned by the gay community, this movie lifts Marsha P.
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This fascinating documentary by David France (Oscar-nominee for How to Survive a Plague, about the AIDS epidemic) is framed around the mystery of Johnson’s unsolved death, while at the same time bringing the achievements of the transgender leader to the masses. When the history of the queer liberation movement is made, one name stands out for her fearless-and for far too long, unrecognised-contribution. Emotionally complex, Stacie Passon’s film struck some surprising notes at a time when marriage equality didn’t exist and heteronormativity was the aim. A Teddy Award winner for queer film at the Berlin Film Festival, Robin Weigert stars as a lesbian housewife who decides kids and a picket fence aren’t everything that she wants, and so takes on the pseudonym Eleanor and the role of sex worker. Marital malaise isn’t just for the normies anymore. Bonus points for featuring the aforementioned drag queen Alaska. But if viewers want to learn about how an old-fashioned mom and pop porno store came to be a force in the queer awakenings of a generation of Los Angeles queers, then Rachel Mason’s funny and touching semi-autobiography (her parents own the titular Circus of Books) is a must see.
If you are perhaps a bit prudish about hardcore pornography, then this documentary might not be for you. Carter Burwell’s score deserves special praise, and the film’s final shot has become rightly famous. It is told with exceptional attention to detail and beautiful craft. The film follows a wealthy 1950s repressed housewife (Cate Blanchett) and her affair with a younger paramour (Rooney Mara), herself in a loveless heterosexual relationship.
Nowadays, it is rightfully seen as just a regular ol’ classic and deserved winner of four Academy Awards.ĭirector Todd Haynes and writer Phyllis Nagy took a chance at adapting a definitive work of lesbian pulp literature (Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt) for the arthouse and it paid off. For a low-budget indie, Alaska is a Drag looks and sounds great, and its cast have a charming naturalism that suits its setting of a small town on the brink of progressiveness.īrokeback Mountain (2005) Watch on NetflixĪng Lee’s groundbreaking Brokeback Mountain has had to weather all the ‘gay cowboys eating pudding’ jokes and survive the mainstream culture’s homophobic response to the very idea of two men (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) having sex on screen (even if it was in a dark tent). Rather, Shaz Bennett’s debut feature is a charming coming-of-age drama, the likes of which went out of fashion in the 1990s. This is not a documentary about iconic drag queen Alaska Thunderf*ck 5000 (but note to Netflix, we would watch that!).