A Retribution (2022)

It’s 2021 and what few LGBTQ+ films that are produced by major film studios continue to star cisgender heterosexual actors, rather than actual LGBTQ+ people.

Hours before their line-up of screenings for Trans Awareness Week began, the filmmakers of 'When Men Were Men' chatted with me about the film's personal exploration of masculinity.

The “gay best friend”, an age-old trope, has been done in countless films and television series. Ranging from one-note (Sex and the City's Stanford and Mario) to nuanced (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's Tituss), the gay best friend exists to support and advise the main protagonist, with their conflicts swept to the side.

Perhaps the most amazing and groundbreaking quality about The Birdcage is how removed it is from both illness and insensitivity. Whereas films preceding it were often somber stories about the tribulations of being gay in a conservatively straight world, Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May expose the fallacies of conservatism as traditional values are thrown into a more open-minded space. They don’t care how far the community has fallen so much as how high they can rebuild themselves.

A young woman finds herself trapped in a crossfire of awkwardness during a nightmarish dinner party with her boyfriend's dysfunctional family.

Director Martin Scorsese broadens his boundaries from mafia-driven movies, to a Buddhist biopic of the 14th Dalai Lama. While Buddhism strives for peace, ‘Kundun’ reveals the violence inflicted on Tibetan Buddhists and Scorsese’s depiction of violence does not stray away.