Gay Best Friend: Cleo (Queen Latifah) in "Set It Off" (1996)

A series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope

Queen Latifah stood out in the ensemble thriller "Set It Off" as Cleo, a butch lesbian bank robber.Be gay, do crimes.

The film business was born with stories of outsiders committing crimes just to survive. The entire gangster genre is built on that premise. Bonnie & Clyde captured the zeitgeist by making robbing banks seem cool. F. Gary Gray’s 1996 thriller Set It Off gives us a very different view of the Bonnie & Clyde story. The film focuses on four inner-city black women each pushed to the brink by a financial system working against them. Rather than lay down and take it, they band together and start robbing banks just to get by. The cast, which includes Jada Pinkett (before Smith), Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox and Kimberly Elise in her first role, is uniformly excellent, building a dynamic that believably has lasted decades.

For the purposes of Gay Best Friend, we’ll take a look at our butch firecracker, Cleo, played with great ferocity by Queen Latifah in the midst of her Living Single fame...

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Emmys Watch: Will Anya Taylor-Joy win in the crowded Lead Actress in a Limited Series category?

Our team is breaking down the top contenders in all the major Emmy races and highlighting some of our favorites over the next few weeks. 

So far, Anya Taylor-Joy has won the Golden Globe, SAG Award and Critics Choice Award for "The Queen's Gambit." Is an Emmy next?By: Christopher James

The limited series field became the go-to place for stories about women this past year. Great performances from Oscar winning actresses go head to head with buzzy, zeitgeisty performances from rising stars. There’s no shortage of contenders, but a shortage of slots. Only five women will earn nominations when they are announced on July 13th. Perennial winner Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit) will likely show up. Will she win though once up again Oscar winner Kate Winslet (Mare of Easttown)? Could a critical favorite like Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You) or Thuso Mbedu (The Underground Railroad) surprise? Or will they end up as a shocking snub?

Read on to see who might be in contention this year...

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Almost There: Forest Whitaker in "Bird"

by Cláudio Alves

After two Cannes Best Actress winners who failed to nab an Oscar nomination, the Almost There series arrives at one of the French festival's male acting champions. In 1988, Forest Whitaker starred as legendary bebop innovator and jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker in a Clint Eastwood-helmed. At Cannes, he won the big prize, and, on paper, the movie does seem like an obvious awards contender. It's from an acclaimed auteur, a traditional epically long biopic, and it came just two years after critics and the Academy had embraced the similarly-themed 'Round Midnight. However, Bird was only nominated for -and ended up winning- the Best Sound Oscar, leaving its leading man unheralded…

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FYC: Elizabeth Olsen, "WandaVision"

by Matt St Clair

Since Elizabeth Olsen burst onto the scene with her stunning debut in Martha Marcy May Marlene ten years ago, she has managed to deliver quality performances in films like Ingrid Goes West and Wind River that allowed her to make good on that early promise. Yet, she hadn’t found a role that reached the same rich, intricate heights as that debut... until now. 

After a supporting role as  Wanda Maximoff (aka The Scarlet Witch) in multiple films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Olsen was given her own miniseries with WandaVision. Though the movies underutilized her, the series proved a strong acting showcase where she could play all sorts of notes between tragedy and humor...

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How Had I Never Seen… the "Valley of the Dolls" movies?

by Cláudio Alves

As part of a robust Pride-themed selection, the Criterion Channel has added Russ Meyer's 1970 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls to its streaming roster. The Roger Ebert-penned follow-up cum send-up to the 1967 trashterpiece Valley of the Dolls is as campy as its predecessor, making the lurid underbelly of show business into the stuff of dragtastic entertainment. In other words, it's a perfect flick to put on whilst celebrating Pride Month. As I'd never seen either picture, I decided to take this as an opportunity to explore them both and share my thoughts with you, dear readers. I don't know what I was expecting from this double feature, but it wasn't what I found. Suffice it to say, I was surprised, gooped, and gagged…

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