Onna no Iji 

A gentle coming of age story, Water Lilies takes its time in exploring what it’s like to be a young girl trying to make sense of her sexuality in a heteronormative world.

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.

The film seems like an extreme interpretation of the conspiracy theorists that exist in real life. And then, there’s the twist.

Battles will come and go and queer people do die for their identity and fights for rights, but that doesn’t mean the gays don’t deserve their happy endings in stories.

This current year, as well as the past several, has seen a slowly building increase in something the horror genre has required for quite a while in this critic's opinion...originality. I've stated before that I am very hard to please when it comes to this vein of the film industry's offerings, always leaning more towards that which sends chills through my very being in lieu of buckets of blood and gore.

Passing is a visually stunning portrayal of Larsen's story with an inclusive cast, and the performances of Thompson and Negga are sensational.