Queer Cinema(s)

“Then I won’t be a girl. And I won’t be weak and I won’t be silly. I’ll be a boy and rough and hard. I won’t care what I do. Don’t worry! I’m ready for anything.”
– Sylvia (Katharine Hepburn)

Sylvia Scarlett is a 1935 romantic comedy film starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, based on The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett, a novel by Compton MacKenzie. Directed by George Cukor, it was notorious as one of the most famous unsuccessful movies of the 1930s. Hepburn plays the title role of Sylvia Scarlett, a female con artist masquerading as a boy to escape the police. The success of the subterfuge is in large part due to the transformation of Hepburn by RKO make-up artist Mel Berns.Read More »

True story of Mary Griffith, gay rights crusader, whose teenage son committed suicide due to her religious intolerance. Based on the book of the same title by Leroy Aarons.Read More »

An ambitious actor and a successful politician start a secret affair, and together they discover their fetish for having sex in public places. The closer they get to their dream of fame, the more they feel the urge to put themselves at riskRead More »

In the nineties the Yugoslavia Federation falls apart in bloody wars. Perpetual student Milan, a Serb from a patriarchal community and Kenan, a Muslim cellist, are a homosexual couple living in Sarajevo. Their lives, intimate and public, are shaken up by the aggression in Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose devastating consequences unfold in inter-ethnic hatred. Read More »

Quote:
Though undeniably an exercise in style over substance from the opening frames, Tony Scott’s languid exercise in gothic vampirism may disappoint those with little patience for arty overindulgence, though those with a taste for slow-burning decay may find The Hunger an involving study in the desperation for love and eternal youth. Vampire enthusiasts and Ann Rice followers drawn to the more romantic aspects of the mythology will likewise succumb to Catherine Deneuve’s seductive menace and David Bowie’s otherworldly charismatic performance, with Susan Sarandon offering a compelling turn as a doctor drawn in to the dark underworld while attempting to halt the vampiric Bowie’s rapidly accelerated aging process. Read More »

Synopsis: A series of unrelated amorous lovers are connected by a chain of desire.

Chain of Desire is a provocative chronicle of contemporary sexual mores, featuring Linda Fiorentino, Elias Koteas, Assumpta Serna, Seymour Cassel and Malcolm McDowell among others. The film was the American entry in competition at the 1992 Montreal World Film Festival.Read More »

Quote:
Wanda is a dominatrix who runs a gallery in a building on the Hamburg waterfront, where audiences pay for the privilege of watching her humiliate her slaves. She is a business woman who smashes sexual stereo¬types and social taboos with icy self-possession and an enigmatic smile. As an artist, she specializes in the staging of elaborate S&M fantasies, while her affairs transgress the usual boundaries of personal and professional life. Along the way she leaves her German lesbian lover, a shoe fetishist, for an American “trainee,” and does more than step on the toes of the male performer who has broken the rules of the master-slave relationship by falling in love with her.Read More »

After deciding that violence against women in New York City has gone too far, a group of Manhattan strippers form a vigilante society to fight back as ruthlessly as possible. As the media hones in on the string of murders and castrations that the posse leaves in its wake, two women become drawn to the renegade group in very different ways.Read More »

Synopsis:
Approaching middle age, the Blakeleys – architect Robert and his brash, overbearing wife Zee – are Londoners who are able to indulge in their collective and individual narcissistic wants because of their financial standing and the fact that they have no children. They have a passionate love/hate relationship based largely on those individual wants. At a party, they meet widowed Stella, a couturier. Robert is immediately attracted to her. Robert and Stella openly embark on an affair, which for Robert is merely the latest dalliance in his life. However, the two fall in love, as, for Robert, Stella fulfills those parts of his life that Zee can’t or won’t since Stella is the antithesis of Zee: understanding with an air of serenity. Zee does whatever she can to disrupt what seems to be the idyllic life that Robert and Stella have set up for themselves, moving from one measure to another as each successive one doesn’t achieve what Zee wants. Through it all, Robert and Zee continue on with their love/hate relationship, one where Stella may merely become a pawn for them to play with, especially as Zee discovers something from Stella’s past.
— Huggo (IMDb).Read More »