The Madonna of the Road
THE ARRIVAL of Madonna: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel, could not have been better timed. In the fall of 2023, the pop star launched a concert tour, which she called “Celebration,” as a showcase of her greatest hits.
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Ripley Revisited
And this is what Saltburn is really about: the seductions and pursuit of wealth and respect. The Cattons are depicted as pretty despicable people, emotionally attenuated, blithely unaware of the world, and often vicious to those around them. And yet, their lives of leisure and those fantastic parties are apparently too attractive to resist.
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The Presence of Things Past
Reviews of Fellow Travelers, Lie with Me, and NYAD.
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Disorderly Conduct
“IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL, you’re going to die a lonely old queen.” That’s a harsh caveat, especially when spoken by one’s wife. In Maestro, directed, cowritten (with Josh Singer), and produced by Bradley Cooper, those lines are delivered by Carrie Mulligan playing actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn, also known as Mrs. Bernstein. Cooper also plays the part of Leonard Bernstein, but his performance takes a back seat to Mulligan’s. An Oscar for Best Actress is widely discussed.
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Boys Found in Baltimore
PHOTOGRAPHER Amos Badert-scher (1936–2023) captured the queer landscape of Baltimore from Eastern Avenue near Patterson Park, along Wilkens Avenue, and the Meat Rack on Park Avenue in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. His monograph Baltimore Portraits came out in 1999, and the recent exhibition Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore in the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, was the artist’s posthumous, first career retrospective.
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The Indispensable Man
Rustin does an excellent job of confronting directly the homophobia that Rustin faced from other African-American leaders while also capturing his charisma as a political organizer and strategist.
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The Wages of Narcissism
LIKE PASSAGES, Ira Sachs’ latest film, his 2014 film Love Is Strange had a gay couple at its center. But while the earlier film featured a longtime pair of sympathetic aging men (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina) living apart under forced economic circumstances, Passages focuses on two thirty-something married artists who prosper on the cultural cutting edge, with an apartment in Paris and a modest retreat in the country. One of them, Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a film director originally from Germany, experiments sexually with a woman, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and, finding satisfaction in the adventure, matter-of-factly informs his British husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) of this episode.
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A Rock Built on Sand
Kijak’s documentary, Rock Hudson: All that Heaven Allowed, wants to show how Hudson was the ultimate victim of the “celluloid closet,” as film historian Vito Russo called it back in 1981. This was the same year in which Hudson underwent quintuple bypass heart surgery due to his pack-a-day smoking and alcohol intake.
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Prepare to Be Dazzled
By Mike Dressel: The fullest expression of Dazzle’s work comes in his partnership with MacArthur Genius grantee Taylor Mac, with the entire fifth floor of the museum devoted to the stage costumes he made for A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. This was Mac’s queer retelling of U.S. history through the American songbook, a lesson in the past reframed through the lens of marginalized people.
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A Star Turn for The Golden Boy
OFFICIALLY CHRISTENED Eternal Youth but generally known to natives of Winnipeg by its nickname “The Golden Boy,” the statue high above the dome of the Manitoba Legislative Building seems to have been inspired by Giambologna’s Flying Mercury in Florence’s Bargello.
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