There might not be enough words in the English language to describe “Dicks: The Musical” (A24), but here are just a few: offensive, vulgar, sophomoric, tasteless, and atrocity.
Screen Queen
In just a matter of days, Halloween 2023 will be a thing of the past. Until that time, there are still plenty of horror movies to watch to put you in the mood to be sufficiently scared, as well as amused. In keeping with the currently popular horror comedy trend, consider queer filmmaker Nahnatchka Khan’s “Totally Killer” (Amazon Studios).
Halloween will be here before you know it. Fortunately, we have movies such as “My Animal” (Paramount) to put us in the (f)right mood. While there are some vague elements such as the time period (could be any time between the 1990s and present day) and the location (some of the accents scream New England), there’s nothing ambiguous about the way it equates queerness with supernatural otherness.
From the first time many of us saw Gael García Bernal onscreen, in “Amores Perros” or “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” we knew he had something special. A little spark they used to call “star quality.” In Almodóvar’s “Bad Education,” Iñárritu’s “Babel,” and more recently, Larraín’s “Ema,” Bernal was never anything less than riveting.
“Strange Way of Life” (Sony Pictures Classics) is gay, Spanish, filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s second English-language short feature following 2020's “The Human Voice.” It’s so thoroughly different from anything that Almodóvar has done previously that, even though it’s only 31 minutes long, it may take viewers longer to process than anything else in his oeuvre.
Based on the novel by Y/A author M. T. Anderson, “Landscape With Invisible Hand” (MGM) is a sci-fi comedy that features clever effects and more than a few laughs, but never achieves its full potential.
Adapted from the graphic novel by Adrian Tomine (who also wrote the screenplay), “Shortcomings” (Sony Pictures Classics) is actor Randall Park’s directorial debut. The movie is a kind of Asian-American “Annie Hall” in the way it looks at modern love and artistic snobbery. It’s also reminiscent of “Barbie” in the way it takes well-deserved jabs at masculinity.
The movies “Keep The Lights On” (2012), “Love Is Strange” (2014), and “Little Men” (2016), comprise what queer filmmaker Ira Sachs has called his New York real estate trilogy. Beginning in 2019, with the Portugal-set “Frankie” (starring Isabelle Huppert), Sachs has shifted his settings overseas. His new film, “Passages” (Mubi), is set in Paris.
Writer/director Jennifer Reeder’s 2017 “Signature Move” is one of the funniest and sweetest lesbian romcoms you’ll ever see. Her new queer body-horror movie “Perpetrator” (IFC/Shudder), as inventive as it is derivative, is sure to be despised by “Barbie” movie-hating Christian nationalists who will go nuts over the female empowerment message. Too bad for them.
In Jeff L. Lieberman’s informative and reverent doc “Bella!” (Re-Emerging Films), there are many fascinating and enlightening things to learn about the late, progressive politician Bella Abzug. But perhaps the most shocking is that she was never before the subject of a documentary, that is, until now.
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