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Jan 16, 2025 | 
washingtonblade.com | JOhn King |John King
There are few movie stars who have been as prolific as Nicole Kidman. In fact, the Australian star of “Babygirl” – the slick erotic thriller by Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn now in theaters – has been so busy in recent years (23 films in the last decade, and that’s not even counting her television work or her gig as celebrity spokesmodel for the AMC Theater chain) that it’s become a running gag in the popular conversation.
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Dec 22, 2024 | 
washingtonblade.com | JOhn King |John King
As Tammy Wynette once sang, sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. That iconic understatement might easily serve as the thesis statement for “Nightbitch,” the new horror-tinged offering from writer/director Marielle Heller. Yet while Wynette was lamenting the hardships of staying loyal to a partner, Heller is more interested in the hardships of staying loyal to one’s self – and takes on a rarely aired perspective on an even more quintessential feminine experience.
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Dec 13, 2024 | 
washingtonblade.com | JOhn King |John King
In an awards season largely devoid of LGBTQ content, one movie asserts itself as the exception by its very title. Much-anticipated after its Venice Film Festival premiere, and buoyed by the buzz around star Daniel Craig’s performance and its well-publicized sex scenes, Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” has begun rolling into theaters.
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Nov 23, 2024 | 
washingtonblade.com | JOhn King |John King
In times of trouble, movies can offer us a chance – temporarily, at least – to escape our worries. Sometimes, though, escape is not the answer. When the political climate turns stormy, they can also be a lifeline, connecting us with our history and helping us to clarify where we’ve been, where we need to go, and how we might manage to get there.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
washingtonblade.com | JOhn King |John King
If you are anywhere in the Queer rainbow and you grew up as a Catholic, it’s possible — if not likely — that your relationship with that religious institution might be, to put it mildly, conflicted. Though there are voices within the church establishment today that endorse official acceptance of LGBTQ people and support their equality, for most of its history that has not been the case.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
washingtonblade.com | JOhn King |John King
When filmmaker Sean Baker chose to shoot an entire feature film – “Tangerine” (2015) – using only iPhones, he caught the attention of film enthusiasts and turned it into his breakthrough. For LGBTQ audiences, however, what felt much more groundbreaking was that Baker had made a film about trans sex workers on the “mean streets” of Hollywood, cast real trans women to play them, and depicted them with as much humanity as the cis/het protagonists in any mainstream movie.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
washingtonblade.com | JOhn King |John King
It’s no surprise that the fall movie landscape finds an unusually large number of films – most of them documentaries – about trans people and the challenges they face in trying to achieve an identity that matches their own sense of self. Transgender rights or even acceptance have never been in such a precarious place within the American political landscape since queer rights were acknowledged at all in the mainstream conversation.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
watermarkonline.com | Jeremy Williams |JOhn King |John King
When Colman Domingo became a frontrunner for last year’s Best Actor Oscar – nominated for his star turn as the titular civil rights hero in “Rustin” – it was big news for the LGBTQ community. He was the first openly gay Afro-Latino to be nominated for the award. Had he won, he would have been the first openly gay actor to take the category, and only the second out queer performer to win in any of the acting categories. It would have been a milestone.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
washingtonblade.com | JOhn King |John King
In Greek mythology, a young mortal named Ganymede possessed such beauty that Zeus himself chose to abduct the boy to Mount Olympus – which wasn’t such a bad deal, considering Ganymede was granted not just immortality to go along with his new job as cup-bearer to the gods, but eternal youth and beauty as well.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
washingtonblade.com | JOhn King |John King
If there is any downside to living in an era when movies about queer people are finally plentiful, it’s that sometimes the best of them are overshadowed by bigger, splashier films and end up getting lost in the mix. Two such titles are a pair of indie projects, both of which focus on “outsider” queer characters, newly available on the VOD market after brief-and-limited theatrical runs; each of them deserves a better fate than that.
