Ravage Nation (2022)

After years of silence, trauma, and backlash, Rose McGowan tells her own story in this miniseries.

Anna May Wong was a talented actress and a fashion icon and still had to fight for everything she had due to hatred and racism.

While it is more than established that Halston’s life is far from a fairytale, the narrative suffers as a result of the decision to revolve more around sex and drugs than his artistry, it likely does a disservice to his cultural impact by pulling focus from his achievements.

In all honesty, “Black and Blue” is a satisfying experience, complete with solid craftsmanship. With the help of cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Deon Taylor (the director) creates a murky, lived in atmosphere.

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

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.