BPM dares to be as sexy as it is devastating, as lilting and funny as it is furious. The film follows a group of young activists in early 1990s Paris as they grieve and protest, getting into granular policy specifics without forgetting the thumping humanity driving its cri de coeur. What Robin Campillo’s brilliant docudrama does is deftly fuse the two together, the broader political anger and the ragged personal accounting. Some of those movies are sharp and urgent others are more softly sentimental. Sadly, many queer movies that aren’t about coming out are about AIDS-another defining experience for several generations of people around the world.
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You leave the movie wishing Latifah would star in a lot more movies, and hoping that there will be more complicated studies of important cultural figures whose legacies are often overlooked by white, straight American record keeping. When Bessie isn’t bringing the house down on stage, Latifah keenly illustrates the tension of her being, her guardedness and her sensitivity, her deep psychic wounds and her forthright mettle.
Bessie’s musical numbers are big and brassy, sung powerfully by Latifah and, in at least once scene, Mo’Nique. Animating Smith’s vivacious, sometimes combative joie de vivre is Queen Latifah, taking a rare lead role and holding the film together with fire and quiet grace.
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That’s mostly because Smith was, by most accounts, unapologetically bisexual, a free spirit who happily, unabashedly caroused with women and men alike-which seems almost an impossible anachronism from our rather narrow contemporary understanding of the queer past. But in telling the life story of legendary blues singer Bessie Smith, director Dee Rees is able to subvert some cliché.
This HBO original movie follows much of the conventional music biopic pattern-the rise, the disillusionment and self-destruction, the tragic fall. The characters in (most of-more on that “most” later) these films have been through those early crucibles, and are now contending with different challenges, curiosities, and passions. Which is why, in honor of Pride month but really any for any time, I’ve compiled this list of 10 LGBT movies, all available to stream on various subscription services, that aren’t about coming out or first encounters. It’s awfully rare that we get to see, on film, the life that lies past those first forays. (Even in real life, in my experience, it’s hard to get through a first date without eventually arriving at each other’s coming-out stories.) And while so many coming-out films are vital-the tentative reaching of Moonlight, the full-throated embraces of Carol-the sheer amount of them piles up to make an imbalanced kind of portraiture. Because the realization of self, and the tacit or direct assertion of that self, is a foundational part of LGBT people’s identity, that process been restaged and reimagined many times in LGBT cinema.