Silence Is a Falling Body (2017)

I wish Silence Is a Falling Body were better. It’s a home-video movie about the filmmaker’s father and his life as a gay man before he married the filmmaker's mother, but the director doesn’t have quite enough footage to fill out her exploration of her father’s life. To make matters more complex, she avoids two pieces of the narrative puzzle that would have made the film more intriguing and compelling: she doesn’t interview her mother and she doesn’t analyze her own gaze at all critically. What does she want to find looking at these images, sifting through these stories? Comedi never actually asks that question in the film. And that’s a let-down.

Rökkur (2017)

Rökkur (Rift) is a spooky gay horror (?) thriller thing. It also doesn’t really work. It’s not bad, but I found it very very messy.

Close-Knit (2017)

Ogigami Naoko's Close-Knit (彼らが本気で編むときは、) is a very sweet family drama about a young girl named Tomo who is abandoned by her mother and who goes to live with her uncle and becomes close to his trans girlfriend. There are many different kinds of mothers in this film, so Close-Knit also gives us a range of possible ways of mothering a child. There is also a secondary storyline about a boy who wants to be Tomo's friend and whom everyone calls gay. This little boy waits for Tomo and asks her to hang out every day, and we slowly learn more about him. Close-Knit is a movie designed, in many ways, to normalize trans folks, to show that trans folks are members of families like anyone else, that they want to love and be loved, and that the desire to be a mother can be shared, rejected, difficult, complicated, or whatever, but being a mother has nothing to do with some kind of internal impulse that women who are assigned female at birth somehow possess and trans women do not.

This whole thing is just charming and sweet. The English title, Close-Knit, refers to familial ties but also to the practice of knitting that becomes a larger theme in the film – just another of its charms, honestly. I have no idea why this wasn't released in theatres in the U.S. back in 2017. It feels like it's something that should have taken off with American audiences, particularly at that time. I don't know what happened, but this is very good.

Tom of Finland #2

Sexy while also being informative, Dome Karukoski's Tom of Finland is a much, much better film than the documentary about Touko Laaksonen's life and work, Daddy and the Muscle Academy, which I watched a couple months ago. Karukoski's film makes clear just how repressive the Finnish government was against homosexual sex in the mid-century, and what is so interesting about this is that it goes a long way to explaining Tom of Finland's fascination with the gear (the drag) of the police, of the military, even of the Nazis. One thing we sort of see in the film is the writer processing the violence he's experienced and his real fear of these people by transforming them into erotic figures. It's a fascinating angle on Tom of Finland's work, and one the film really sold well.

I also had somehow missed that Laaksonen had a longtime partner, Veli “Nipa” Mäkinen, with whom he shared a home for most of his adult life. This film shares that story, too, and I fell in love with the actor who played him, Lauri Tilkanen.

Something Useful (2017)

İşe Yarar Bir Şey (Something Useful) is poetic, and it has some very good scenes, but I was impatient with it, and it is very talky, and I found it frustrating. I really liked every scene with Yiğit Özşener. He was really excellent, and of course Başak Köklükaya is stunning and wonderful. This was good, but it was overwritten, to my taste.

I saw Something Useful with my movie club, though, and almost everyone else was quite taken with this.

I, Olga Hepnarova

Já Olga Hepnarová is gorgeously shot and I quite enjoyed it. It's a very odd movie, and it definitely has a few continuity problems, but the central performance is amazing, and the character is so intense and strange, that this becomes quite compelling.

Gook (2017)

Gook is a well made US American tragedy. This has some great performances, and the script has lots to recommend it – especially as an original take on the Rodney King riots in 1992. I liked it a lot.

Signature Move (2017)

I was excited to love Signature Move (سیگنیچر موو). How often do you get to see a love story between a Pakistani American luchadora and a Mexican American bookstore owner. But Signature Move is honestly just a typical straight-to-video gay romantic comedy with very low stakes, a low budget, and more than its fair share of bad acting. The most exciting moment I had watching this was when my friend Kareem had a cameo I wasn't expecting as a random dude who kisses another guy.

 I watched this with my unseen movie club, and I sort of felt bad for choosing it. But you can watch it anywhere you stream movies.

La Jeune Fille sans Mains (2016)

I've never seen an animated feature drawn like The Girl without Hands. It's just gorgeous – meditative and strange and quirky and grotesque. I loved it. Definitely worth watching.

Columbus (2017)

Columbus is gorgeous, simple, really moving. In a way it is a talky piece about a man dealing with his father and a very young woman dealing with her mother, but Kogonada has shot the architecture of Columbus (Indiana not Ohio) so lovingly, that the film becomes much more than it seems to be, and Columbus is about how we love the spaces around us, how we get comfortable, and how we help the people we're with.

Kogonada loves Ozu (as he should, he's the best director ever to make movies), and it shows in the way he photographs spaces and silence between people.

This is a quiet, lovely film with some beautiful photography and great performances (Haley Lu Richardson is really wonderful). I was very moved.

Kogonada's next film is called After Yang. It is supposed to be released in 2020, and it stars Haley Lu Richardson (good choice) and Colin Farrell (!). I don't know when we get to see this, but I'm ready.

A Moment in the Reeds (2017)

A Moment in the Reeds is very interesting and beautifully shot. I loved the two main actors in it, too. But... this film's explorations of gay immigrants to Northern Europe felt unfinished or underexplored. What the film is really interested in is how stories like those of gay immigrants to Finland might put the stories of gay Finns into relief. This seems to me a less-than-careful approach to an interesting and important topic. The end of the film, too, leaves a lot to be desired. All of this isn't to say that this film isn't quite good. It's just not everything I wanted it to be.

Malila: the Farewell Flower (2017)

I loved Malila: the Farewell Flower (มะลิลา). It never got a theatrical release in the U.S., although it played several film festivals, including LGBTQ ones. It's a gorgeous movie about spirituality and queerness and flowers and death and grief. It stars a brilliant Sukollawat Kanarot, who is a big TV star in Thailand, and it was directed by trans filmmaker Anucha Boonyawatana. It's lovely. Oh and the score is gorgeous!

Hello Again (2017)

Tom Gustafson's Hello Again was really bad. This is a queer (or sort of queer) musical version of Schnitzler's La Ronde with music by Michael John LaChiusa. And, like all versions of La Ronde that I've seen, it has nothing holding it together. This one compounds that problem further by having each actor play a different character in his or her next sequence. So we don't even get a single character for more than one musical number. Worse yet, everyone in this piece is unhappy.

The film was also obviously made on the cheap. The whole thing is unfortunate.

I remember liking Gustafson's film Were the World Mine, which was also a cheaply made, overtly theatrical musical film about gay romance, but Hello Again is not interesting, despite its more recognizable cast.

120 Battements par Minute (2017)

120 Beats per Minute is basically perfect. It is without question the best movie about AIDS I've ever seen. As a friend recently said to me: It might be the best anything about AIDS I've ever seen.

The final 20 minutes of this movie are absolutely extraordinary, capturing perfectly the impulses to mourn and party and fuck and protest that have been so beautifully theorized by Douglas Crimp and others. But it's no use even singling out those final 20 minutes because the entirety of 120 Beats per Minute is superb, and the performances – particularly Nahuel Pérez Biscayart's – are excellent.

The Fencer

The Fencer (Miekkailija) was utterly conventional, but it's beautifully photographed, and I rather loved every sentimental bit of it. The acting is also top-notch, which helped a great deal.

Princess Cyd

Love love love love.  Princess Cyd is filled with light and wisdom, and it's very moving and gentle. It's a gorgeous, generous film with a central performance from Chicago actor Rebecca Spence that is breathtaking. This is such good stuff.

Logan Lucky

Logan Lucky was really funny, and for the record I thought it was much funnier and not nearly as classist as I, Tonya. I love that Channing Tatum. He's just so great.

The Death of Louis XIV

It is unquestionably inspired to have cast Jean-Pierre Léaud as Louis XIV for this movie, but the film itself is claustrophobic and even tedious. I know Serra is supposed to be a daring, challenging filmmaker, but La Mort de Louis XIV was definitely not for me.

Nocturama

Nocturama stressed me out a lot. It's beautifully made, but I am not sure how I feel about it. I loved the characters; I loved Jeanne d'Arc; I loved the department store. But maybe I thought the whole thing was a little too smug for me. The end is really good, though.

Super Dark Times

The filmmaking is great here. Excellent script. Very good acting all around. I really liked Super Dark Times even if I find myself skeptical of the whole kids-are-unfeeling-cold-and-merciless message. Still, the whole thing is directed beautifully – especially the film's opening sequence.