Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Flashing needles and literal crowns of thorn mark the work — and the body — of performance artist Ron Athey Modern primitives don’t get quite the respect they used to.[…]
Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
The man who gave us Urinal and Lillies now turns his playful eye on circumcision, copyright, and Pierre Trudeau. In his early short film, The Making of Monsters (1991), Canadian[…]
Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Ronald Tavel, Mario Montez, and Edie Sedgwick strut their superstardom in these early works by the master of pop kitsch camp For most people, the quintessential “Andy Warhol film” is[…]
Directors · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Sluts, stoners, and screeching drag queens decorate Morrissey’s curdled campfests Gerri Miller: “You used to be dynamite, Joe. Don’t you miss it?” Joe Dallesandro: “Uh … yeah.” – Trash It’s[…]
Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews · Visual Artists
The love in this film about the two lost boys of Eurotrash art is mostly self-love. The art of Pierre and Gilles, affectionately known as P&G, has always been a[…]
An arresting look at the limited lives of four New York singles, playing themselves British director Nicholas Barker’s New York cult hit Unmade Beds has an unintended effect that will[…]
Even the cinematic frame isn’t safe from Sokurov’s grim sleight-of-hand Painterliness in cinema has its pitfalls. Filmmakers like Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman built careers on bringing visual imagery familiar[…]
Watch out for that “placid surface.” Movies based on plays don’t always fare well in the transition. There’s a double danger here: slavishly recreating the “stage experience” in its often[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
The supreme masterpiece of the poetic documentary form Three recent views of Cuba: the repressive, fragmented, poverty-stricken last gasp of modern Communism offered by the U.S. media; the wonderland of[…]
LGBT & Queer · Reviews · Visual Artists
Timid top George Dyer meets pushy bottom Francis Bacon, with art and death the inevitable result In a typical moment in this artful biopic of Francis Bacon, the ultra-queer painter[…]
Forgotten biopic offers a baker’s dozen of delights Is Words and Music, MGM’s 1948 “and then they wrote” biopic of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, a masterpiece? Although long[…]
Sex, art, and romance — some notes on the sources of Truffaut’s famous film It is 1935. (Theodore) Adorno writes to Walter Benjamin, “With regard to your remark on fashion,[…]
Horror · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Monsters and drag queens and dykes — oh my! After decades of being devalued by lousy prints on video and television, Universal’s classic ’30s horror films have been resurrected, refurbished,[…]
Film historians have made much, and rightly so, of the enormous influence of 1930s German and Austrian émigrés on the American film scene and by extension on American culture in[…]
The ultimate in queenly revenge as an obese ugly duckling becomes a sleek, sophisticated homo The fairy tale about the ugly duckling who turns into a swan gets the gay[…]
Again Hollywood cheats on the issue of two men kissing – when are they going to get it right? In the past few years, two distinct trends have dominated gay[…]
“Fellini’s structuring of his heroine’s story as a series of incidents rather than a linear plot was innovative at the time, doubly so because examples of a woman at the[…]
Nobody suffers like Oharu The first time I went to see Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu, I asked a friend who was familiar with the film to come with me. Although[…]
Music & Musicals · Pre-Code · Reviews
“All Singing! All Dancing! All Color! All Racist!” Whoopee is a find, a treasure, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Most of all it is a chunk of Flo[…]
Three of Kurosawa’s scathing critiques of Japanese society past and present – in beautiful new video transfers. Akira Kurosawa has been seen as one of the three components of a[…]
