The Cinesexuals

The recent (2014) release of James Franco’s Interior. Leather Bar. reminds us it’s time to revisit the still-notorious film that inspired it. History shows us how easily yesterday’s cause celebre can become acceptable and even tame by present-day standards. Such is the case with William Friedkin’s underrated 1980 film Cruising.

On fascism, homonationalism, and America

The LGBT+ community especially finds solace in horror — they identify with characters’ desire to escape and survive. Cruising, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and Jennifer’s Body have certainly gained valid traction over the years, but what about other movies in need of attention? They, too, offer insight into the collective queer horror experience.

Tackling apartheid-era toxic white masculinity as a mixed race South African, filmmaker Oliver Hermanus rose to the challenge with his searing new feature Moffie, streaming on Curzon Home Cinema now. Olivia Neilson meets the director

And that could have been what Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee, American Horror Story, et al., and Ian Brennan tried to do: ask probing questions about how institutional power operates, what the meaning of screen representation is within a larger political context, what politics means in its knottiness in an industry that exists under capitalism. But, instead, in Hollywood, Murphy’s second venture for Netflix after The Politician, he spoon feeds us a fantasy so single-minded and one-dimensional, the tinsel of tinseltown has more depth.

While we might not see it now, the 2010s have defined the trajectory of LGBTQ+ cinema for decades to come. After a century of being kept in the closet, outed, dehumanized, and othered onscreen and in the industry as a whole, LGBTQ+ filmmakers & actors are finally being given the opportunities to tell their own stories with the authenticity, tenderness, and depth they deserve.

You’ll say that the title is a little extravagant but that was the point. In fact, my idea was to make a list with good films. Some LGBT films have no interest except the one of talking of LGBT people but some LGBT films are little treasures, here they are

Leilah Weinraub’s riveting Shakedown documents a Los Angeles strip club owned by and aimed at Black lesbians in the early years of the twenty-first century, and when it played festivals and arthouses a few years ago it plugged seamlessly into an obvious lineage of work centered on queer people of color building their own culture and institutions, from Paris is Burning (1990) to Kiki (2016).

AsAs the camera slowly pans over piled up moving boxes filled with scuffed up shoes, a Puerto Rican flag, trophies, and a drawing of the state of Texas, the premiere of Love, Victor, a 10-episode Hulu spin-off of the 2018 film Love Simon, establishes who Victor (Michael Cimino) thinks he is and who he has known himself to be.

The Georgian folk dancer is an image of masculine stereotype. His movements are martial, virile; they simulate war, hunting, and the courtship of his beloved. Often accoutered with a double-edged dagger, he personifies the small, proud nation’s history and traditions. So when the Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin arrived in Tbilisi to shoot the country’s first explicitly queer feature film, a coming-of-age story about a traditional dancer, he was met with not a little hostility.

Producers of the ABC’s ‘Please Like Me’ have today accused the winner of the 89th Academy Award’s Best Picture, ‘Moonlight’, of plagiarising the life of Josh Thomas.

The host of the program asked him with the success of this documentary, what he planned on doing next, Bressan answered, “I want to make a feature-length gay narrative story about two men who are in love for commercial distribution. I would say a gay breakthrough film that straight people can go see and gay people can see.”

Charting an odyssey of classic gay erotica, from Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.'s "Passing Strangers" to Wakefield Poole's "Boys in the Sand"

A filmed version of the 2018 Broadway revival is just as bad on screen as it was on stage—maybe worse.

We Can’t Afford a Hollywood Marriage!” was the headline in the October 1933 issue of Hollywood magazine and, beneath it, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were pictured whistling as they did the dishes together at the kitchen sink and singing happily at the piano in their living room.

As far as I’m concerned, Paul Lynde is the patron saint of Halloween. His campy, mischievous, subtly sinister style is exactly the vibe I want all October long—and it doesn’t hurt that he gave us the greatest Halloween special ever.

“My goal was to make a film for the teenager I was,” says director François Ozon of his new picture Summer of 85, a love story based on Aidan Chambers’ 1982 novel Dance on My Grave

Claire Denis’s film “Beau Travail,” a luminous tale of desire and despair in the French Foreign Legion, had an uncanny effect on me when I first watched it some years after its release, in 1999.

Filmmaker Dan Hall accidentally found himself in contact with more than a hundred queer people in Afghanistan living under Taliban rule. He shares some of their stories in a powerful new film.

A lot of films feature LGBTQ themes and characters, but for every "Call Me By Your Name" and "Brokeback Mountain," there is a movie like "Boat Trip."