The Link Has Two Faces

Your Weekend Must Read
Emily Yoshida at Vulture gazes at Ingmar Bergman's Persona but she sees way beyond that, too, to the dream space shared by cinema's curious subgenre of female identity swapping. 

Two women talking: a recipe for witchcraft, an unnatural feedback loop, a cursed redundancy. Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece Persona is a landmark for many reasons, but its legacy, which has show no signs of age in the 50 years since it was released in the U.S. and the U.K., is how it stared that anxiety in the face and opened up a loopy, meandering conversation that’s still going on to this day...

More Linkage
Keyframe 'The Year of Nicole Kidman' don't force her to prove herself all over again
Variety Cannes lineup is "high on "awards intrigue, low on safe awards bets"
/Film Aquaman is overflowing with villains, 3 already for a first solo film? (not a good sign) and a fourth may have been added
Coming Soon Antonio Banderas will headline Lamborghini -The Legend (working title) a biopic about the Italian entrepeneur of automobile fame. Alec Baldwin will play his rival Enzo Ferrari 

Boy Culture "STREEPSHOW" a drag comedy about "characters one played by Meryl Streep" living together in the East Village will be playing NYC in June. Sounds hilarious but I have to admit that it took me quite some time to figure out the characters in the photo (and there seem to be two Miranda Priestleys?) which is maybe not a good sign. Shouldn't they be instantly recognizable?
Guardian Mixed messages from Cannes as TV premieres from auteurs are happening but they've also banned Netflix from future competition unless they stop skipping theatrical releases
Variety Gay gasp! The BBC is producing a series of 15 minute monologues called Queers which is set to star Ben Whishaw, Alan Cumming, and Russell Tovey and others
Awards Daily Gypsy teaser, a new series starring Naomi Watts
Variety Hugh Bonneville will play Roald Dahl in a biopic set in the early to mid 1960s. This means they're going to have to cast someone to play both Dahl's wife Patricia Neal and her most famous co-star Paul Newman (see Hud) and both of those roles will be a Herculean casting task! 
The Guardian there's a documentary playing Cannes about Cary Grant's experimentation with LSD from 1958 through 196
Tracking Board Kenneth Branagh to direct himself in a movie about the father of Anne Frank The Keeper of the Diary

Not Remakes Though You Might Mistake Them For Such
/Film Martin Scorsese starts filming mob drama The Irishman this summer with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci
Gothamist Leonardo DiCaprio will star in The Black Hand about an undercover mob cop...
(Ummm, haven't all these people already made these movies? Why not mix it up with a romantic comedy or a sci-fi picture?)

Exit Video
Look it's the first clip from Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck. It may be impossible to follow Carol but we're glad that he got back on the horse so quickly after that long time away from us. How does this clip strike you?

Drag Race S9E8: Roasting is Fundamental

by Chris Feil

Last week, RuPaul’s Drag Race gave us a stellar episode thanks to a nearly across the board strong performance by all of the queens. This week, we got an equally great episode but for the opposite reason.

The queens are challenged with the one-two punch of the Reading is Fundamental mini-challenge and a revival of season five’s RuPaul Roast (and six's photocopy Queens of Comedy). There may not have been a Laganja-level meltdown this time, but it has its share of Roxxxy flatline drama. Until know, you may have missed that we are short a comedy queen this season - though many of them can bring the funny when needed. [extreme Patti LuPone voice] They are wonderful, you know, performers for what they do, but they are not stand-up comedians...

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Pedro Party: All About My Mother

It's a Pedro Party all week. Here's Lynn Lee on her introduction to Almodóvar...

To all actresses who have played actresses.  To all women who act.  To men who act and become women.  To all the people who want to be mothers.  To my mother.”

All About My Mother was the first Almodovar film I ever saw, and as it happens, I saw it with my own mother.  I don’t remember why I picked it for us to see together.  It certainly wasn’t because of the title or because I thought it would be something she’d particularly like.  In fact, if I’d thought about it more, I might have been anxious that she would find it too outré.  Or for that matter, that I would; as both a movie lover and a young adult, I was just beginning to learn what was out there and how far it stretched beyond my own personal experience.

To our credit, or rather to Almodovar’s, there was no reason for such trepidation...

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New to Netflix: "LOEV" is a many splendored thing

Please welcome new contributor Seán McGovern to TFE

LGBT titles on Netflix are tricky – how to see cute boys, feel all fuzzy and yet be artistic? Enter last year's critically acclaimed LOEV, which breezed its way onto Netflix everywhere last week. LOEV, Sudhanshu Saria's dreamy and offbeat romance from India was both a critical and audience favorite of the festival circuit in 2016. 

Western viewers may take for granted the quality and significance of some LGBT film out there, but having gay central characters in Indian cinema is still greatly taboo and faces serious challenges by the cencors – upbeat Bollywood films such as Kapoor & Sons take on an extra sense of daring when viewed by different sets of eyes (and yep, still make boffo box office).

Navigating romance was only part of it for Saria who I spoke with earlier today...

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Tribeca 2017: My Friend Dahmer

And here's Jason Adams reporting again from the Tribeca Film Festival.

"Even more, they were boys, with their cars, summer jobs... oh my god... are you one of them?"

Sufjan Stevens sings that to the victims of John Wayne Gacy Jr. in his song titled after that serial killer, an attempt at finding some sort of empathy or a modicum of understanding buried beneath the front porch of a gay man's home turned graveyard. And now, taking a similar path through darkness towards more darkness, comes My Friend Dahmer, an adaptation of Derf Backderf's graphic novel about the writer's experiences going to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer...

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