The Horror of Repression
TRANS AND NONBINARY director Jane Schoenbrun’s new film, I Saw the TV Glow, is a disturbing and powerful meditation on queer identity and popular culture.
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‘Transatlantic Transformations’
Brilliant Exiles represents the culmination of years of research and study to restore the suppressed history of America’s female moderns. It belongs on the shelf of any reader interested in the cultural legacy of this period and beyond.
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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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The Presence of Things Past
Reviews of Fellow Travelers, Lie with Me, and NYAD.
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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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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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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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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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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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