Two boys and a young girl struggle for their lives and suffer horrible abuse at the hands of their caretakers during their stay at an orphanage. Taken from the orphanage they are thrown to the streets where their journey to survive will force them to fight for their very lives. Two of them find romance while the third is abducted, to be groomed for membership in the mafia. A powerful and mysterious person in the shadows monitors and influences their lives from afar. In a series of Machiavellian moves, this antagonist orchestrates a series of seemingly innocuous coincidences that move the three of them even closer to the final conflict culminating in the perfect opportunity for spectacular revenge. Their paths are very different but the ghosts of from the past will eventually bring them back together...
"Rodgers' & Hammerstein's Cinderella" wasn’t just a fairytale, it's a Black girl's fairytale. It was a fantasy world where the undeniable beauty of Black girls and Women was celebrated and beloved.
Overall, Matthias & Maxime doesn't reinvent this romantic concept. But it also doesn't need to. Dolan weaves a story of love, friendship, and life that is both realistic and bittersweet. The film is nuanced and sensual in a way we don't get to see often with LGBTQ characters. It's a film that we can celebrate.
Americans love the British monarchy. This may seem confusing because only a few short hundred years ago they were our worst enemies, and every year we celebrate our independence from them. The Crown humanizes the monarchy, which might explain its popularity.
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.
Disney has a glaring and, up until recently, unaddressed issue that spans nearly its entire lifetime - an absence of diversity.
