Browsing: Film

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Goldin is one of the documentary’s producers and its principal protagonist. The film thematically weaves together two complex narrative strands: her personal story and the protest against the Sacklers. The latter takes place against the backdrop of images from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), her autobiographical slide show set to music that became a cultural touchstone of the 1980s and elevated Goldin to prominence as a photographer.

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YIDDISH has entered the American language so extensively by now that most people have probably heard the word “shiksa”—especially if they’ve read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s the Yiddish word for a gentile woman. Robert Hofler’s new book on the making of the Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford movie The Way We Were (1973) is about its masculine equivalent, the much less euphonic “shegetz.”

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Our Flag Means Death is unlike any other show out there, although I must warn viewers beforehand not to expect a clichéd fairy-tale ending. And yet, if Season 1 comes to an end, can Season 2 be far behind?

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My Policeman and Spoiler Alert could not be more dissimilar in tone, but they both portray men in love as dismally doomed from the get-go. Neither challenges the cultural script that male relationships must end disastrously, though My Policeman does offer the two principles some redemption as old men.

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Another provocative idea buried in the script by Eichner and co-writer Nicholas Stoller is that all romantic love is not the same, which flies in the face of the love-is-love mantra that LGBT folks often espouse. The awkward sex scenes bear out this idea when Bobby and Aaron wrestle in their underwear, sniff poppers, and end up with post-coital grins to match.

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Joel Kim Booster’s Fire Island is not only a light-hearted love letter to its eponymous locale but a randy reimagining of Pride and Prejudice. In the role of Noah (a corollary of Jane Austen’s feisty heroine, Elizabeth Bennet), Booster speaks directly to the audience and helps to translate terms that an “outsider” may not understand.

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MY FIRST GRETA GARBO experience was the 1933 film Queen Christina. From the moment she appeared on the screen, I found myself breathless, overcome by her cinematic presence. I barely paid attention to the story or the other characters; all I saw was Garbo.

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THE NAME Siegfried Sassoon may be known to those who follow English poetry or have an interest in the Great War, or who wish to be versed in LGBT culture, but probably not to many others. A new biopic titled Benediction, by gay English director Terence Davies, is the story of Sassoon told as a chronological inquest into the psyche of one of the great war poets of his era.

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Though Firebird is set 45 years ago, viewers will realize that the same repressive system is still destroying lives; little has changed. The film focuses less on politics than on how authoritarian regimes impact ordinary people’s lives, crushing love and inflicting pain and suffering on everyone it touches. And yet, …

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