Mexican Spitfire's Elephant (1942)

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.

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.

Yeah, sure, the movie’s about Carnage. But it’s really about love. A love that defies all odds: the love between a man and his man-eating alien symbiote.

As a frequent “the book was better” extoller, this movie was well worth the watch. 

Two Distant Strangers (2020) centers around Carter James (Joey Bada$$) as he tries to get back home to his pitbull, Jeter, after spending a night at the apartment of his date Perri (Zaria Simone). What gets in the way of Carter reuniting with his dog is that every time he tries to leave Perri’s apartment,  he is killed by police and wakes up back in her bed in a never-ending cycle. It addresses the issue of police brutality which rightly has been in the public eye more and more with the unjust deaths caused at the hands of law enforcement.

Meander, released in 2021, is a French gory horror film featuring a woman trapped in small spaces as she fights for her life, paralleling real pandemic life.