Don’t Look for Love
THE GAY BDSM biker movie Pillion fits surprisingly well into the romantic comedy formula, deftly interweaving comedy, drama, and romance. But those expecting a trope-heavy film about love and acceptance …
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Knives Out
WHETHER you’re queer or not, we all sometimes police our feelings or hold back our true selves, an internal struggle that can build anxiety and compel us to ask what it means to live truthfully. Gay writer-director Carmen Emmi explores these conundrums in his evocative feature debut, an edgy psychological thriller titled Plainclothes …
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The Music Lovers
From the start, the film maintains a tone of emotional austerity, as an early voiceover by Chris Cooper, speaking as the much older Lionel, retrospectively identifies himself as a country boy raised on a Kentucky farm. He explains how his musical and vocal precocity sent him in 1917 to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where we see him join other male students at a local bar one evening. Amid friendly chatter and the haze of cigarette smoke, the atmosphere is further softened by the sounds of a pianist accompanying himself as he sings a folk ballad. Recognizing the song, Lionel quietly strolls over and watches the pianist.
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Subverting the Hays Code
LUCKY WERE THE STUDENTS enrolled in the course on queerness in American cinema taught by Michael Koresky, film critic and editorial director of the Museum of the Moving Image at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness is the resultant comprehensive study of the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, covering the broad scope of censorship by the Motion Picture Production Code, commonly known as the “Hays Code” after the man who adopted and enforced it.
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Art Briefs
It’s high time we had a CD devoted entirely to piano music by gay and lesbian composers—and not played by just any pianist, but by the internationally renowned David Kadouch. Born in Nice in 1985, Kadouch has been praised for his elegance, insight, emotional power, and eloquence as a performer—all of which are on display here.
MoreLooking for Love in Mostly Wrong Places
Review of the films Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, Sauna, Dreams (Sex Love), Jimpa, and Cactus Pears.
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Short Reviews
Reviews of the books Red Hot + Blue, by John Garrison, The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994 by Thomas Mallon, and Nonbinary Jane Austen; and the movie, Clean Slate
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Windows on Worlds Far from Home
Reviews of the movies: Some Nights I Feel Like Walking, The Wedding Banquet, The Rebrand, I’m Your Venus, and Heightened Scrutiny
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Love across Cultures, with a Twist
A NICE INDIAN BOY is an exuberant film as well as a touching celebration of unconventional romantic love defying expectations. Director Roshan Sethi’s film also touches upon issues of family loyalty, cultural misunderstanding, and intergenerational conflict.
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Addicted to Love (and Heroin)
This movie feels like a journey, even an adventure, not only to a different time and place—into the Amazon, along for a psychedelic trip—but further inward. If each person contains an entire universe, Guadagnino, like [William S.] Burroughs, endeavors to chart a course for the stars, despite the deep holes that await him along the way.
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