Halfway Mark Box Office (Part 2: Of Special Interest)

As part of our midway through the year report (previously: top fives from the team , favourite male performances , and mainstream box office hits) here's a look at the box office year thus far but getting very niche with queer cinema, documentaries, movies with rave reviews, and other specialty interests. We all know that superhero movies earn a lot of money at the box office so it's more fun to dig deeper. Figures here are actuals as of Sunday June 30th for films released in the first six months of the year. We'd love to know what you make of the following lists so don't be shy in the comments, please.

BOX OFFICE IN EIGHT NICHE CATEGORIES
🔺= the movie is still in a decent number of cinemas so its numbers will go up.

TOP GROSSING FILMS THAT NEVER WENT INTO WIDE RELEASE

The Mustang

01 No Manches Frida 2 (Pantelion) $9.2 March 15th (472 theaters at widest)
02 Apollo 11 (Neon) $8.9 March 1st (588 theaters at widest)
03 The Wandering Earth (CMC) $5.8 Feb 5th (129 theaters at widest)
04 Gully Boy (Viva Pictures) $5.5 Feb 14th (270 theaters at widest)
05 The Mustang (Focus) $5 March 15th (527 theaters at widest)
06 Amazing Grace (Neon) $4.4 April 5th (263 theaters at widest)...

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Pride Month Doc Corner: Four restored queer classics in re-release!

by Glenn Dunks

The Film Experience and Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. In this final edition we're looking at four classic documentaries that have now been restored and are back in theaters (in select cities), waiting to be (re-)discovered: The Queen (1968), A Bigger Splash (1973), Before Stonewall (1984), and Paris is Burning (1990).

We will begin with the earliest and move forward through time. I was lucky enough to see The Queen on the big screen at a repertory screening in New York several years ago... 

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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Trixie Mattel: Moving Parts'

By Glenn Dunks

The Film Experience and Doc Corner are celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. We had planned to cover the new HBO doc Wig about the return of Wigstock, but HBO wouldn't allow it so now Trixie Mattel is here being reviewed all by herself.

Brian Firkus aka Trixie Mattel needs no introduction to fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but a new documentary made by director Nicholas Zeig-Owens and the World of Wonder production house that produces the series seeks to do just that. Treading fairly similar ground to Drag Becomes Him about season five winner Jinkx Monsoon (fellow Drag Race contestants BenDeLaCreme appears in both being sage and wise), Trixie Mattel: Moving Parts follows a year in the life of the folk-singing drag queen with the face of a Dollywood beauty pageant.

Knowing precisely what fans will be watching a movie like Moving Parts for, Zeig-Owens begins with the mental breakdown of her UNHhhh and The Trixie and Katya Show co-star, Brian Joseph Cook aka Katya Zamolodchikova...

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Pride Month Doc Corner: Activists, Fighters and Organizers

By Glenn Dunks

Once again, The Film Experience and Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes.

This week I am looking at four films, each of which focus around the fight for equality and LGBTIQ history across America. My favourite of the group is Southern Pride, a continuation of director Malcolm Ingram’s first documentary Small Town Gay Bar. Where that film navigated the communities around the bars Rumors and Crossroads, Southern Pride delves into two different bars – Just Us Lounge in Biloxi and KlubXclusive in Hattiesburg – as they attempt to pride events on the state’s gulf coast, the first of their kind.

Just Us owner Lynn Koval is the force behind the primary event with even RuPaul’s Drag Race competitor Gia Gunn booked, while KlubX’s Shawn Perryon, the recipient of a racist jailing for pot, who seeks to build a home for the region’s black queer population and with her own Unapologetic Black Gay Pride event.

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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Halston'

By Glenn Dunks

Once again, The Film Experience and Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week is Halston, a fashion bio-doc about the famed American designer.

He was arguably the most famous out homosexual in America; feted by magazines and talk-shows, lauded in name by celebrities from coast to coast. A man of a certain time who emerged timeless; a pillar of an industry that had remained strikingly insular until his brand helped bring it to the American masses. Roy Halston Frowick left his impressionable mark on history early on, designing First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s iconic pillbox hat and translated that mark of destiny through a career that weaved down runways, across discotheques and into department stores.

His life is given an appropriately razzle-dazzle treatment in Halston from director Frédérick Tcheng. Told through the unusual narrative device of a fictional, unknown woman researching his life through video tapes, Halston is one of the more formally interesting examples of the fashion bio-doc genre and is infused with an atmosphere that is as slinky as one of his bias-cut dresses while also embracing his extravagant Manhattan lifestyle of chic glass offices, limousines and cocaine that evoke an era of lavish and queer excess.

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