Joel Kim Booster’s Fire Island is not only a light-hearted love letter to its eponymous locale but a randy reimagining of Pride and Prejudice. In the role of Noah (a corollary of Jane Austen’s feisty heroine, Elizabeth Bennet), Booster speaks directly to the audience and helps to translate terms that an “outsider” may not understand.
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Reviews of the films Peter Von Kant, All Man: The International Male Story, Lonesome, and Chrissy Judy.
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THE NAME Siegfried Sassoon may be known to those who follow English poetry or have an interest in the Great War, or who wish to be versed in LGBT culture, but probably not to many others. A new biopic titled Benediction, by gay English director Terence Davies, is the story of Sassoon told as a chronological inquest into the psyche of one of the great war poets of his era.
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Though Firebird is set 45 years ago, viewers will realize that the same repressive system is still destroying lives; little has changed. The film focuses less on politics than on how authoritarian regimes impact ordinary people’s lives, crushing love and inflicting pain and suffering on everyone it touches. And yet, …
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The success of Great Freedom depends almost entirely on its two leads, who play a pair of prison inmates who cross paths repeatedly over the years between 1945 and 1969. We’re first introduced to Hans, played by Rogowski, who frequents public toilets looking for hookups. On his most recent arrest and incarceration, in 1968, we discover that he’s an unrepentant recidivist. An older cellmate, Viktor, played by Friedrich, welcomes back his younger companion with a certain familiarity and good humor.
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A SCENE in Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog took me back to the years I spent growing up in Montana, where the story is set. Peter Gordon, a boy in his teens whose widowed mother has married one of two brothers who own a large cattle ranch, walks past the open tents where men who have spent the day haying are resting. The men begin to whistle, “the whistle men give to a girl,” as it is described in the novel on which the film is based.
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The structure of Miranda’s film is ingenious, working on a kind of “meta meta” level. Larson’s musical tick, tick…BOOM! was itself a one-man-show about the creation of the musical Superbia, focusing on those crazy days before the big workshop and (spoiler alert) the failure of any producer to come forward.
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Released in 1969, the year of the Stonewall Riots, and garnering considerable attention in the media and recognition from the major film award organizations, Midnight Cowboy was a remarkable achievement for its time.
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THE “FEMME FATALE” gained a popular foothold in the detective fiction of the 1930s and then, even more visibly, in the great films noir of the 1940s and ’50s. In these narratives, the femme fatale often seizes command of the straight male gaze and harnesses it to her own purposes, her own pursuit of power. …
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Murray’s list of unheralded accomplishments is a long one. Among many firsts, she was the first African-American to receive a Yale law doctorate (1965) and the first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Her signal contribution occurred in the field of jurisprudence.
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