Have you ever heard Cynthia Erivo sing 'The Last Five Years'?

by Nathaniel R

Twas very depressed last night scrolling through social media (rarely a good idea) when I chanced upon this reshare of a video from 2015 that I'd never seen. At some point just before The Color Purple' started its previews on Broadway a pre-fame (at last in regards to the US) Cynthia Erivo showed up at Marie's Crisis (for non New Yorkers, that's a very famous basement piano bar near Stonewall). She sang "I Can Do Better" in full (eagle eyes will spot her co-star Danielle Brooks right behind her). As a fan of Erivo and a crazy-obsessive Last Five Years stan (I went to the original Off Broadway run and listened to the cast recording on loop for a full year) this was pure heaven for five minutes...

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How Had I Never Seen..."Xanadu"?

by Cláudio Alves

In these stressful days, it can be nice to sit back and lose ourselves in the escapist marvels of cinema. Of course, what constitutes escapism varies from person to person. Some love the bloodlust of gory pictures while others revel in good midcentury melodrama. Whatever your poison of choice is, now seems like a good time to indulge. For me, one surefire way of dispelling the doom and gloom of day-to-day life is to bathe in the glamour of movie musicals. Other prime sources of stress-relief are those movies which are so terrible, so unbelievably miscalculated, that their turpitude becomes entertaining. The logical conclusion is that there's no greater joy than watching a movie musical that's so bad it's good.

Well, that's precisely what I did one monotonous afternoon, trading in the frustrations of reality for the disco disaster fabulousness of Xanadu…

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Centennial: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920)

by Tony Ruggio

1920... Eerily and surprisingly, wasn't so different from 2020. A new generation had upended social norms, a deadly pandemic had spread throughout the world, and a major western democracy was in the throes of a post-war identity crisis. A country in search of a tyrant, Germany was a mere decade away from learning the name Adolf Hitler, and the nation’s artistic output reflected as such. 

It’s astonishing to realize that feature films have been around for more than a hundred years, that our grandest medium of pop art has endured for so long. The cinema has persevered through war, competing technology, and economic calamity. Such questions of perseverance are ripe for discussion again in the midst of our current pandemic, one that has shuttered movie theaters around the world. A film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,  currently streaming on Criterion and now 100 years young, makes clear to us that movie-making will never go the way of the dinosaurs...

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Doc Corner: Tribeca Film Festival x4

By Glenn Dunks

The Tribeca Film Festival is sadly a no-go for 2020, but the teams behind some of the festival’s documentary selections have made their films available for press so we’re going to take a look at a few and hope that one day they make their way to screens for you in the future.

Let us start with a delight of a drag kiki in P.S. Burn This Letter Please, tracing an underground circuit of drag queens, female impersonators and gender illusionists in 1950s pre-Stonewall New York City. Prompted by the discovery of a box of letters all addressed to a mysterious man named Reno -- I won’t spoil the fun, but the recipient has ties to Michelle Pfeiffer! -- who kept them secret, and in doing so has kept alive a part of queer history that is too fabulous to stay hidden away. Through these letters and interviews with some of the surviving queens, directors Jennifer Tiexiera (an excellent editor of works such as Dragonslayer, one of my top documentaries of the decade, and 17 Blocks) and Michael Seligman (a producer on RuPaul’s Drag Race) untangle the insignificant dramas and life-changing moments of Daphne, Adrian, Claudia, Rita George and the rest of the gang.

Before Paris is Burning and even before The Queen, P.S. Burn This Letter Please offers insight where there has historically been so little. As one talking head explains, this is real gay history in black and white.

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Review: Bad Education

by Tony Ruggio

Filmmaker Cory Finley is fast becoming an auteur. That much is clear, and more, when watching his second directorial effort Bad Education, a great film unfortunately relegated to the streaming fringes of HBO. A film this good would’ve been poised to make a bigger splash with Netflix or Amazon, as well as contend for Oscars over Emmys.

Hugh Jackman gives the best performance of his career as Frank Tassone, a Long Island area school district superintendent who in the early aughts, along with district business manager Pamela Gluckin (Allison Janney) and others, embezzled millions of dollars from school funds to support their lavish lifestyles... 

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