popsublime: gay cinema

I’m happy to report that this was a routinely strong year at the annual film fest in Provincetown, with documentaries again leading the pack for me, along with a variety of distinctive narrative features. I even laughed along with spirited audiences at the campy sex comedies on Friday and Saturday night; past audiences have sometimes asked for some lighter fare to be included in the line-up, and well, they got it. Even this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge award recipient, Ryan Murphy, fulfilled that request as the first recipient of the award to receive it mainly for a body of work in mainstream television rather than cinema, a feat that John Waters commented on in their conversation on stage at Town Hall on Saturday afternoon. If getting to ask Ryan Murphy some questions about TV shows like Glee and American Horror Story doesn’t appease the masses, then it’s unlikely that anything else will.

That pivot into the realm of television marks a particular moment in the current trends and evolution of cinema as well, perhaps. There’s plenty of discussion at the moment about the surprise runaway success of Backrooms and Obsession, horror films by young directors that have drawn younger audiences back to theaters. John Waters asked Ryan Murphy about that, too, of course, and they both agreed that getting a successful film made for relatively little money while exponentially increasing ticket sales at cinemas certainly must be seen as a commendable endeavor, though Murphy also remarked that a phenomenon like The Blair Witch Project turned out to be less an innovative pivotal point artistically and more of an inspiration for plenty of insipid copycat movies that simply ripped off its artisanal hand-held camera, perspective-based concept.

All of that industry-level talk aside, I was glad that my first film out of the gate at the festival last Wednesday afternoon, Matty Wishnow’s insightful documentary The Last Critic, was so enjoyable since it was the first time that the festival has held film screenings prior to the opening night feature. I wrote a weekly music review column for a newspaper a little over twenty years ago now, so it was fun to hear Christgau as the “dean” of American rock critics comment at length on the development of his own tastes and critical style. Famous for his Consumer Guide and its graded capsule reviews of significant albums, and equally infamous for his trenchant takes on albums that he deems insignificant, Christgau is more humorous and self-effacing on camera than the tenor of his reviews may imply. Because he’s a voluminous collector and a true music fan, the film works to boost the viewer’s trust in him as a guiding critical source. Christgau claims there are only two criteria to become a critic: you have to know what you like, and you have to be able to explain why you like it, no matter how "completely disgraceful" the reasons are. Therefore, the most useful commentators in the documentary are often other music critics such as Ann Powers, maybe even more than the musicians who are interviewed, from the great Randy Newman to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

For instance, when the discussion turns to Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece Blue, for which Christgau knew to dispense the highest praise and an A on his graded scale, a female critic points out that it was Christgau's chance to demonstrate how deeply he understood Mitchell's aesthetic mission to prove that the material of women's inner lives could be the full focus and basis of art. He's still shrewd on camera, but not nearly as intimidating as the intricate concision of his playfully rude capsule reviews and D+ (and lower) gradings of albums by artists like The Eagles, Billy Joel, and Bryan Adams might suggest. Part of what makes the documentary enjoyable to watch and listen to is the true enthusiasm of the commentators for Christgau's decades of tireless, influential work. The film ends with Christgau contemplating his recent flashes of memory loss, and even more than his mortality, the potential loss of his intellectual faculties as he continues to age into his 80s. His closest supporter, reader, and editor is his wife, the music critic and novelist Carola Dibbell, who also movingly recalls her diagnosis and successful treatment for cancer via the lens of Robert Forster's contemplative song "It's Only Poison" in the film's final stretch.

The beloved poet and essayist Mary Oliver lived in Provincetown for the majority of her adult life, so it makes perfect sense that Sasha Waters’ new PBS documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World screened to a packed house at Town Hall. As celebrated as Oliver’s inspirational poetry about the natural world and our human relationship to it has been, it also makes sense that plenty of celebrities (Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Colbert, etc.) comment on and read her work in the film. It’s to the movie’s credit that there’s a healthy focus on the poems themselves, which helps to prevent the documentary from devolving into a formulaic approach to a poet whom some critics have argued became somewhat formulaic over time as well. I always liked the darker, more mysterious, and less certain angles in a book like Oliver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 volume American Primitive, which was the collection that ultimately helped her cross over into the mainstream.

After closely tracking that rise to literary prominence, the documentary then adds some openness to Oliver’s famed privacy, which it’s now more possible to do after her death. Dedicating herself to devotion and affirmation ran into difficulties for her poetry eventually, and so the film reserves the more challenging biographical details (sexuality, gender, childhood abuse, addiction, estrangement from her family of origin) for later in the documentary. Oliver’s partner and business manager of over forty years, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, remains intriguing as always, and the film also gives her due attention. I reviewed the collection of her photographs Our World (with text by Mary Oliver) for a magazine back when it came out, so I had less to learn about them as a couple, but the majority of Mary Oliver’s readers won't know about those aspects of her life, so of course there will be an audience for the movie regardless.

Since I loved Aaron Brookner’s documentary about his filmmaker guncle Uncle Howard in the festival a decade ago, I knew that I’d also love Keri Pickett’s new documentary Uncle Roy, which is about her photographer (and former figure skater) gay uncle Roy Blakey, who died in 2024 at age 94. Blakey grew up in Oklahoma and became a well-known photographer and celebrity portrait artist in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. He captured some of the most iconic images of drag artists and performers like Divine and Candy Darling, in addition to taking headshots of many actors and actresses who were on their way up in the worlds of film and television into the 1980s. His prior career as a figure skater during the height of ice-capades shows was previously documented in Pickett’s 2015 film The Fabulous Ice Age, and his extensive collection of ice show memorabilia is now housed (along with his photography archive) in the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection of GLBT history at the University of Minnesota, the largest repository of queer historical materials of its kind in the Midwest.

Roy Blakey, as presented in the film, was a beacon of positivity throughout his youth and adulthood, even into very old age, with nearly every photograph we see of him in the documentary showcasing his beaming smile. He comments on his bright disposition himself in the film as well, an attitude that he maintained during an era when where he grew up in the middle of the country was a time that was often unkind and sometimes downright hostile to visible gay men. Being drafted into military service for two years took him to Europe (and eventually to Japan as a figure skater), and he expresses gratitude for that fortunate relocation many decades later as he reflects back on where his life had taken him. Escaping to New York from the middle of the country as a gay man might not be such an unusual story anymore, though what Roy Blakey did in the city distinguishes it, not only for the vast archive of celebrity portraits that he preserved, but also for the lunchtime entertainment that he provided as a figure skater on the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. He found ways to pursue all of the things that he enjoyed and integrated them into who he was as a fun-loving and hopeful person.

His niece Keri Pickett’s engaging and heartfelt homage to him in Uncle Roy invites the audience as close as it’s possible to get to the subject of a documentary. Since they shared photography as a profession, they opened a large studio together in Minneapolis, a space in which they both lived and worked together well into Roy’s later decades. She helped him to place his archives at the Tretter Collection, a deal that he signed just five weeks before he died. Although Roy remains sharp and alert right up through to the very end, Pickett does bravely document his decline across the border into memory loss as well. Late one night at 3am, she films him opening up a door to another room, and he says he’s looking for the entrance to the arena, in a sadly moving flashback to his figure skating days. She helps him through the moments of his transition on his deathbed in difficult scenes that we are also right there for. Halfway through the film, Roy mentions that he had never found a partner and so never knew love in that way. A few times when he thought he had, “it turned out to be only lust,” he recalls, in a scene that reminded me of a nearly identical moment in a documentary about the gay street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. When I told Keri Pickett that I’d definitely be writing about her movie after our screening’s Q&A, she gave me a very kind hug, and I said that even though her Uncle Roy hadn’t found a longterm romantic partner, her beautiful film will now offer a way of giving the entire world a chance to love him in memory.

A couple of summers ago, I enjoyed writing about Jane Schoenbrun’s film I Saw the TV Glow, so I was excited to watch their latest movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a cleverly deconstructive send-up of the slasher genre, with specific reference to Friday the 13^th and its many sequels, not to mention even trashier movies such as Sleepaway Camp. In a bold and immersive performance, Hannah Einbinder (of the TV show Hacks) plays a writer/director named Kris who’s been hired to re-boot the Camp Miasma franchise, setting off into a moody wintertime wilderness to find Billy Presley (an all-in bewigged Gillian Anderson, with a lilting Dolly Parton accent), the actress who played the final girl in the original film from the series and who lives at Camp Tivoli where the first movie was filmed, complete with an empty snowbound cinema that Billy also hauntingly inhabits. Instead of the dreaded hockey mask worn by Jason Vorhees, the killer (who’s slyly named “Little Death,” portrayed by Jack Haven from Schoenbrun’s last film) in the Camp Miasma movies wears a comically large square air vent over their head, an eerily disjunctive symbol that makes them no less menacing. From the brilliantly referential opening credits sequence onward, the film is an intentionally extreme jumble of symbols and horror-related “Easter eggs” that are meant both to make the audience laugh and also to question the stereotypical slasher tropes and signifiers within the genre that has relentlessly produced them, particularly with regard to sexual twists and gender identities. We hear several times that the movies come from “the hole at the bottom of the lake” where Little Death seemingly dwells.

Despite the chemistry of its leads and their obvious investment in their roles, the film didn’t quite match for me the daring synergies in the first three-quarters or so of I Saw the TV Glow, nor was there as much of an analytical payoff. This new film is well-made overall and looks great as it swerves from outright macabre horror to dark fairy tale to the crazier lesbian underside of a classic like Sunset Boulevard, but something about it felt to me both underdeveloped and overwrought, which I suppose is part of the point. Transgender motifs again emerge through the figure of Little Death specifically as the movie progresses, and the character’s name circles around and around the orgasmic fear and desire captured in the original Camp Miasma film’s pivotal and violently transgressive moment, which is recreated in a way in the reboot-in-action as we’re watching it that’s excessively over the top, so that what this movie imagines to be its core audience can then simply just laugh it all off and feel like things worked out just fine. The first half of the movie is very carefully structured, whereas the second half loops into some obvious redundancies just as I was hoping that it would move into deeper or more illuminating territory, which gets kind of shrugged off for an easily pleasing sort of resolution (though I loved hearing the voice of Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile singing a new song “Pain Is the Heart” during the film’s emotional climax).

Nonetheless, it was fun to hear Jane Schoenbrun and Hannah Einbinder interviewed on stage at the festival by legendary producer Christine Vachon the day after I saw the movie. As I’d anticipated, Jane was cool, quirky, and also clearly very knowledgeable industry-wise from doing film production work themselves in their twenties. Jane was also hilariously honest about the business. When asked how it feels to get to spend the funding for their movie, their half-joking reply was, “It's always like a bank heist.” And when the subject of “new queer cinema” arose, Jane again half-joked, “I think I’m done with queer cinema.” Still, Schoenbrun is also very conscientious about making an emotional connection and enacting social change through their body of films, which again, I feel I Saw the TV Glow did a bit better than their latest film, even if this one will obviously be more popular in riding the current cinematic horror movie wave.

Finally, since I’ll always watch at least one love story about gay men at the film festival in Provincetown, I was moved by novelist-turned-filmmaker Helen Walsh’s film On the Sea, which was especially moving to watch in a historical gay seaside town. While waiting in line to enter the venue, attendees were buzzing about how it’s a version of Brokeback Mountain set on the northern coast of Wales, or more appropriately, a version of God’s Own Country set on the Welsh coast instead of in the Yorkshire Dales. Jack (Barry Ward, ruggedly handsome and telegraphing everything with a gorgeous pair of eyes) harvests clams and scallops from the cold ocean shallows in a family business that’s been handed down to him through three generations of mussel farmers, and he’s trying and somewhat failing to hand it down to his own son’s generation as well. Married to a woman and closeted for his entire life, Jack hesitantly falls under the spell of an alluring itinerant worker named Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen, fittingly alluring), who’s thirty-ish and therefore more adept at cruising and signaling interest, and relatively open about being gay in light of his fortunate youth and enough cultural change that’s reached even the northernmost outskirts of coastal Wales, apparently.

In spite of those societal shifts, traditional masculinity (alongside religion and heteronormative sexuality) still reign in Jack’s time and place, though Daniel’s subtle advances and flirtations gradually wedge their way inside of Jack’s closed-off spaces. What works best in their characters’ interactions is what’s silently suggested since their eventual physical surrenders to each other must take place in quieter far-flung locations: out on a boat in the ocean, swimming together in a secluded tidal pool, or inside Daniel’s rented caravan with the curtains drawn. Daniel notices a surgical scar on the side of Jack’s abdomen that he asks him about, and we see Jack’s examinations at his doctor’s office at intervals throughout the film. Luckily, therefore, the looming tragic ending is built into the narrative and not simply a punishment for the two men’s secret once it’s uncovered. Ultimately, though I was worried at first that things might get clunky or sentimental, what unfolds in the film’s final stretch is handled quite sensitively. Sure, the wife kicks Jack out of their home, Daniel moves on to his next destination, the town turns on Jack, and then he moves into a local hotel while trying to keep his work going as his health devolves. Yet everyone comes around in ways more quiet than dramatic. When his wife shows up to let Jack know, “There’s someone here to see you,” cue the audience’s tears as Daniel snuggles up behind Jack in his bed. Sometimes a man, regardless of who he is or what he’s been through, gets the tenderly bittersweet happy ending he deserves.

Thursday, January 1, 2026

Five Favorite Films of 2025

None of the five films that I’m including here as favorites from 2025 were movies that I ever thought that I’d be writing about for my year-end post, not even remotely, and three of them are contenders only because 2025 was the weakest year for cinema thus far in my 52-year lifetime. A couple of them I’ll be writing about only in part, one for its central performance, and another for its final twenty minutes or so. This was a year in which I saw Wicked: For Good twenty (yes, twenty) times in cinemas, a personal record that I doubt I’d ever have broken were 2025 not such an underwhelming year for cinema as art (vs. mere commerce). I’m championing these five films because in most cases they were ignored, not taken seriously, or even outright ridiculed. Audiences in general can’t be relied upon as any kind of critical barometer anymore at all, neither mainstream audiences nor critical audiences. Do the majority of people these days know cinema history and critical history well enough to do the actual work? No, they do not, which only makes me even more proud of how bizarre, eclectic, disparate, and surprising this list of my five favorite films of 2025 truly is.

Tonatiuh, who stunningly portrays Molina (and Molina’s imaginary, fictionalized counterpart) in Bill Condon’s spectacular musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman, should rightly become a massive star, and I predict that he/they will. Tonatiuh acts, dances, emotes, and sings the hell out of this role, and the fact that this movie has been so unjustly overlooked is pure downright homophobia, y’all. Produced by the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Diego Luna, this so-called remake is miles and miles ahead of its 1985 predecessor. (I mean, William Hurt got an Oscar for Best Actor for playing Molina? Get real, Academy! Give Tonatiuh EVERY DAMN THING, or I will simply lose my mind.) I’m totally convinced that the reason this movie has been cruelly and almost entirely ignored is because it’s a tender, moving, and somewhat unprecedented gay/trans love story. Watch it, and you’ll know exactly that I mean. This world has a lot of catching up to do.

Diego Luna’s performance as the Argentinian political prisoner Valentin is equally multifaceted and exact. He inhabits his role in a manner that’s both full of heart and replete with talent, in that he sings & dances expertly (while making it come across intentionally as semi-amateurish), menaces, becomes a heartthrob after first being a stubborn fool who cannot be loved but then finally is loved because he opens himself up to it. What a joy to watch the kind of character transformation that we so rarely see in cinema these days. Through to the film’s final image, Luna ably and fully carries the torch of understanding for both his own character AND Tonatiuh’s, to the extent that their relationship in the film bears the burden of real historical meaning, especially with regard to trans-identified individuals, their romantic and sexual desires, and their intimate relationships. It’s revealing that during their audition conversation via Zoom, Diego Luna told Tonatiuh (who’d prepared multiple elaborate scenarios for the occasion) simply to relax and have a conversation with him. That sort of humanity and mutual respect shines through both of their performances, ultimately, and buoys the movie in ways that very few films are successfully borne by their actors anymore. (And yes, Jennifer Lopez is excellent as the Spider Woman. Mindless detractors, please go away.)

Black Phone 2 is the film that I’m most perplexed ended up in this post. While I thought the first Black Phone installment (adapted from Stephen King’s son Joe Hill’s suspenseful yet sparkless story) was tolerable, it was kind of just an archetypal (yet intelligent enough) retread of the whole “abducted boy trapped in a disgusting basement dungeon who fights his way out and kills the killer” horror movie staple. Black Phone 2 is on another level entirely, and that’s largely due to its distinctive setting: a wintertime Christian camp on a frozen alpine lake in the depths of blizzard season. It’s an origin story on several levels (ho-hum), but no matter since the actors all get it and firmly lock in the narrative, especially the brilliant Mexican actor Demián Bichir as the longtime overseer of the camp’s employees and counselors.

Mason Thames reprises his role as Finney Blake a few years later, and it’s really his performance (played against the relentless menace of Ethan Hawke as the Grabber) that distinguishes Black Phone 2 from standard horror movies. (Horror was the ONLY film genre that actually grew in 2025 by the number of films released.) Whether Mason Thames was directed as such or made his own choice as an actor, it’s clear that there’s an atypical commentary on pedophilia threaded throughout Black Phone 2, from as early as a scene where Finney is smoking out on his front porch at night and imagines the masked Grabber, whom he murdered by strangulation at the climax of the first film’s finale, beckoning to him from beside some breeze-filled trees. Finney has a simultaneous flashback to an image of the Grabber gently stroking his fallen bangs from across his forehead, remembers what he said to defend himself, and quietly stares ahead into the distance as he takes a drag from his joint.

It’s as though the filmmakers are suggesting that teenage Finney is somehow, on some level, slightly now more at peace in himself with what transpired through the mundane abduction plot of the first film, or at least he now has a grasp of the Grabber’s carefully planned motives that younger boyhood Finney did not. The subdued tension brought about by that smoking-at-night-on-the-porch scene in particular feels uniquely innovative to me in the horror genre, and for me it tilted forward the entire balance of the movie in ways that I hadn’t anticipated whatsoever. Re-emphasizing that aspect of the film is the central plot device of three young boys whose ghosts are trapped under the thick sheet of ice atop the frozen alpine lake, who were killed by the younger version of the Grabber long ago (hence the ho-hum origin story), and whose unburied spirits are restlessly urging Finney and his sister to save them.

Ryan White’s profoundly moving documentary Come See Me in the Good Light should win this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary, full-stop. The film focuses on the final years in the life of the celebrated non-binary performance poet Andrea Gibson, who died of complications from ovarian cancer in July of this year at age 49, just one month prior to what would have been their fiftieth birthday. Gibson’s brave partner Megan Falley is equally a part of the film, both as the foundational heart that keeps their relationship together through the very hardest of times, and often as an initiator of some much-needed humor to buoy them through things that young couples should never have to endure, though I’m sure that plenty of people do every day. I just want everybody to stream this film on Apple TV, so I won’t say much else except that 1) I cried about seven times while watching this film at the IFC Center in New York City, from like three minutes into the film until all the way through the heart-stopping closing credits song “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” by Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile (which should also receive an Oscar for Best Original Song, to be honest), and 2) I downloaded every single one of Andrea Gibson’s e-books the very moment I walked out of the cinema. Like their inspiration Mary Oliver, Gibson aimed to make their poetry a mission of redemption and a gift to other human beings, a way to try to help them through their lives and survive.

Jacob Elordi’s indelible physical and vocal performance as the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein will stay with me probably for the rest of my life. By the end of the movie, I wanted to walk around every day in his character’s awesomely ragged, burnt-out, “I’ve survived every kind of catastrophe” shredded black ribbons streaming backwards in the arctic winds costume like some kind of gangly Gothic matinee idol. Jacob Elordi should be, will be, and is one exactly: a matinee idol for the ages, and this performance absolutely cements it. As much as I appreciate online commentaries by those in-the-know about the deep significance of the physically masterful elements that Elordi brings to his role (since the Creature begins as an infantile semi-being and advances through the gauntlet of every tragedy that the world can possibly throw at him in a nonstop onslaught of violently desperate bombardment), I was even more taken in by Elordi’s voice, a voice that learns as it goes, that philosophizes and grapples and soothes and eventually understands, or attempts to. Whoever marries this man someday will be a very, very lucky person. He’s the real deal: a reader, a scholar, a tall kind heart, and one hell of a phenomenal actor.

Finally, I loved the final twenty minutes or so of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, and I could probably watch Noah Jupe’s face as Hamlet in that scene at the Globe Theatre for most of 2026, to be honest. What makes the scene work is how it captures Shakespeare’s genius (in part via Paul Mescal’s performance as the Ghost and as Will himself). Rather than having the ghost of his dead son Hamnet appear in the play, which would have been the logical choice for any other playwright, of course William Shakespeare would write Hamlet’s father as the ghost, since grief in the wake of Hamnet’s death has made a ghost of Will as Hamnet’s own father (and obviously of Jessie Buckley’s often too over-performed character as Hamnet’s mother). Art abstracts the truth, a lesson that even Zhao’s film doesn’t quite learn, unfortunately, for the vast majority of it leading up to its final scene. And just as sadly, the vast majority of films released throughout 2025 didn’t learn that vital lesson either, and so on we go to 2026.

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Wicked and Wicked: For Good (dir. Jon M. Chu, 2024 and 2025)

Wicked and Wicked: For Good are a once-in-a-generation cinematic experience. Moreover, these two films will have a dedicated global audience for at least two generations, probably for fifty years or more, not dissimilar to the long-range success of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. These two new movies amply honor that movie’s glorious (and serious) legacy, while also very generously augmenting and expanding it. If Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande don’t both receive Oscars for their indelible performances, I will be rioting. And why is the director, Jon M. Chu, receiving so little attention overall in the wake of these films? Perhaps he doesn’t need any. He made two perfect movies that are both consummate entertainment and deep, meaningful explorations of a wide variety of themes and dialectics: female friendships and rivalries, outsiderdom and insider-ism, secrecy and honesty, old and new orders, dreams and nightmares, humanity and animalism, and I’ll stop there since this list could clearly go on for quite a while.