'Swan Song' is a Scattered But Sincere Story of Small-Town Redemption
Udo Kier takes center spotlight in 'Swan Song' as Pat Pitsenbarger, a gay beautician who comes out of retirement for one last job and rediscovers himself along the way.

Marcia, a sexy bucolic orphan, hitch-hikes to the city to meet up with her sister, who has promised her a job at the roadhouse where she works as a hostess. She has no qualms about sleeping with her driver in order to be safeguarded to her destination. Once she arrives, she discovers that her sister has recently been violently murdered -- in a stangulation by garter belt. Marcia takes her sister's job in order to go undercover in finding the murderer. She thus imperils her own life while making discoveries about her sister's former lifestyle and the seamy antics of the local civic leaders.
Udo Kier takes center spotlight in 'Swan Song' as Pat Pitsenbarger, a gay beautician who comes out of retirement for one last job and rediscovers himself along the way.
As an extremely avid fan of DC’s animation, I’ve become familiar with the way the studio uses Batman as a bit of a Trojan Horse to introduce some of their lesser known characters.
GOAT (2026) opens to the chanting of a crowd: "Roots run deep!" The rest of the film goes on to echo that sentiment, offering gorgeous animation and a heartfelt story along the way.
A haunting look at grief, survival, and a mother’s quiet collapse in a world that never gave her room to fall.
Netflix’s Shadow and Bone has a complicated relationship with race. It has a diverse cast, but not without its problems. Based on Leigh Bardugo’s two book series, the show features characters from the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which is very straight and white, and the Six of Crows duology, which is much more diverse. When bringing together a cast and writing about these characters, the team behind the show expanded upon some of the representation missing from the first trilogy, then seemed to take away representation from the duology. Shadow and Bone seems to play a bit of a push and pull game when it comes to portraying diversity onscreen.
Highlighting the many ways in which AFF 2023 illustrated that the queer experience is not a monolithic one.