Six Favorite Movies of 2018

It’s been my annual tradition to write a year-end post about my five favorite movies of the year, but for my latest post looking back on the films that I saw in 2018, I’ve decided to expand it just a bit to include six movies this time. I definitely feel like I enjoyed more movies overall this year, and 2018’s cinematic fare to me was slightly higher quality. I still think there’s some connection to the worldwide political turbulence that we’ve witnessed recently, partly because art is our most powerful way of pushing back against all of that, as well as tuning it out on some level, in order to focus on more important things that speak to our common humanity and the stories that unite us. That’s one thing movies are supposed to do: build bridges between people and cultures to help make our lives more complete.

My favorite film of 2018 was English director Andrew Haigh’s moving and original road movie Lean on Pete, which he adapted from Willy Vlautin’s 2010 young adult novel. I totally loved Haigh’s 2011 film Weekend when I saw it back then, and I really vibed with the gay men and smart dialogue that he presented in that movie; Haigh and I are the exact same age, so when I’m watching his films, it’s like we speak a similar interior language as gay men from a certain generation. Although there’s no gay storyline in Lean on Pete, Haigh’s sensitivity in representing the itinerant life of a teenage boy named Charley (played by the extraordinary Charlie Plummer) who’s abruptly cut adrift from his family and society — while also finding solace alongside an end-of-the-line quarterhorse called Lean on Pete that becomes Charley’s reliable companion — spoke directly to me on deep and multiple levels. For whatever it’s worth, no film this year made me cry as hard as Lean on Pete. I was so emotionally shaken when I left the cinema that I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to drive myself back home after the movie, though I made it back just fine.

I wouldn’t want to give away too many of the details in Lean on Pete, so instead I’ll mention some individual aspects of the film that still stand out in my memory. Several scenes are classic and indelible, such as a scene in a roadside diner where Charley is forced to make a life-or-death decision, as well as the scenes in which Charley walks and talks quietly to Lean on Pete as the two make their way across arid desert landscapes. It’s a picaresque story, so Charley also meets some memorable characters along the way: a cruel yet paternal horse wrangler (Steve Buscemi), a kind and sisterly jockey (Chloë Sevigny), and a disturbed young veteran (Steve Zahn). The artful, widescreen cinematography of Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, who’s often working with a muted palette of magic-hour pastels in the film, leaves a profound and lingering impression from one chapter of Charley’s journey to the next.

Another movie about a boy and his horse that I loved nearly as much as Lean on Pete was Chloé Zhao’s spare and patiently calibrated film The Rider. The director has mentioned that about half of the film is “true” in the sense of documenting a young South Dakota bull rider/horse trainer and his family of Native American ancestry, while the other half of the film is scripted and “fictional.” The young man, who is recovering from a serious head injury after being thrown to the ground in a riding accident, is played with remarkable candor and restraint by amateur actor Brady Jandreau, in one of the very best cinematic performances of its kind. Jandreau inhabits his character Brady Blackburn’s predicament entirely believably because he lived it. He’s also beautiful to watch throughout the film, as fluid and magnetic when he’s breaking in a wild colt as he is when his sister places small gold stars all over his chest while he sleeps.

If Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film Roma doesn’t win this year’s Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, then I’ll probably never watch the Oscars again because Roma is as accomplished as Fellini’s finest movies. A personal remembrance of Cuarón’s childhood in Mexico City and Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio, also Oscar-worthy), the character based on a maid who raised him and his siblings, Roma is a truly monumental film, both in its cinematic scope and in its secure place in the history of movies about memory. Filmed in grayscale black-and-white, the movie poetically and seamlessly constellates its imagery in ways that burrow far into thematic meaning and interconnectedness. Water rinses across a tiled stone driveway throughout the opening credits, but we’re not aware until later that the film’s focus will become the very housekeeper who’s washing that driveway down. We see an airplane fly overhead in the reflection of that water, too, an image that will re-appear at the end of the film in a neat circle, one that also suggests the need for escape, as well as the imminent arrival of the age of globalization. Cleo’s own background as a Mexican villager, which is integrated in quieter rather than overt ways, is a touchstone for the grim legacy of colonization, a legacy that echoes throughout other tragic upheavals that occur later in film.

After reading the abysmal reviews of Lars von Trier’s new film The House That Jack Built, I’d never have predicted that the movie would end up on this list. Masquerading as a mock-drama that shocked audiences and prompted walkouts at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film is actually more of a darkly perceptive comedy that follows the over-the-top escapades of a serial killer, portrayed by Matt Dillon in a performance so consummate that he can basically just retire now. The seemingly mundane and brutal surface of the movie might deceive most viewers into missing the film's ambitious allegorical underlayers. Lars von Trier has discussed, provocatively, that the main character Jack is closer to himself than any other male character from his films, suggesting that the movie is actually an examination of the role of the artist in society, even an examination of Lars von Trier’s own body of work. I think the only way to really “get” the film is to be an artist who’s willing to forego human comforts like love and family in favor of art itself. The movie descends into Dante’s Inferno in the end, with Jack’s Dante following Bruno Ganz’s Virgil as they proceed through carefully stylized circles of hell. It’s the most exciting final half-hour of any movie that I saw this year.

For my review of Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel in my coverage of this year’s New Hampshire Film Festival, I already wrote most of what I needed to say about that fantastic film. Its many rich characterizations and its dialogue have continued to haunt me, however, over the past two months since I saw the movie. What I’ve realized since then is just how invested the director is in resurrecting his youthful experiences through those particular characters. What did it mean as a gay man back in 1993, under the threat of potentially losing one’s friends and lovers to AIDS, to want to have a child with a female friend and raise him in tandem? And what did it mean for gay and bisexual men of that generation to want to love anyone at all, in the midst of so much widespread loss? Which parts of that love were actualized, and which parts of that love remained only imagined?

Finally, as a kind of wildcard bonus, my favorite feel-good movie of the year was Travis Knight’s Bumblebee, the only Transformers movie I’ve seen. Sure, there’s enough standard action-sequence mayhem in Bumblebee to appease the fans of those films, with John Cena’s character on a military mission to track down the rogue autobot B-127, who’s been hiding out as a yellow Volkswagen Beetle in the family garage of Charlie — a kind-hearted tomboy winningly portrayed by Hailee Steinfeld — after Charlie discovered Bumblebee in a junkyard and revived him by accident. Set in 1987, my favorite year in pop music, Bumblebee features hits by everyone from Steve Winwood to Sammy Hagar to Nu Shooz, and snippets of many other excellent songs cleverly punctuate the soundtrack. The movie’s bittersweet tone recalls Steven Spielberg’s E.T. and the ’80s Ally Sheedy-starring classic Short Circuit, so the nostalgia is built right into the plot. All of the films that I love best from that era never hesitated to uplift the audience and make the full range of human emotions worth experiencing, and Bumblebee wonderfully recreates and pays tribute to that same form of cinematic generosity. As Hailee Steinfeld sings in her awesome end-credits track, Bumblebee brought me back to life.

Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas (Capitol Records/4AD, 1990)

Three of my favorite musical statements about motherhood in the pop music lexicon are Madonna’s Ray of Light (1998), Björk’s Vespertine (2001), and Tori Amos’ The Beekeeper (2005). The fourth is Cocteau Twins’ 1990 album Heaven or Las Vegas, which also remains among my very favorite albums nearly thirty years after its release. With bursts of lyrical intelligibility and swooning vocal flourishes that border on rhapsodic, Elizabeth Fraser celebrated throughout these ten songs the experience of giving birth to her first child, Lucy, with Cocteau Twins bandmate Robin Guthrie.

When I first heard Cocteau Twins back in August of 1990, I was still only a babe myself, a 16-year-old boy growing up in a condominium subdivision of suburban Cincinnati, Ohio. Somewhat embarrassingly, my introduction to the band was seeing the video for “Iceblink luck” on MTV. I’d never heard of Cocteau Twins before that, and I certainly had no idea who Jean Cocteau was at that time. As a gay kid who listened to pop radio constantly, I was, understandably, totally hypnotized by the song, which sounded to my unsophisticated ears as though it had landed from elsewhere in the galaxy. I felt about it the same way I felt about classical music: intrigued and reverent, without any need for a narrative through-line or explicitly logical connections. I just wanted that sound to surround me.

My job that summer was working at Camelot Records in Northgate Mall, so I purchased the cassette tape of Heaven or Las Vegas with my employee discount after my very next shift. (For me back in those days, every dollar that I earned was equivalent to one-seventh of a new cassette tape.) I remember listening to the album non-stop throughout that fall during my senior year of high school, my moods coasting along on Simon Raymonde’s swells of bass guitar. Even then, I felt that I’d tapped into something new and meaningful, and that I’d started to turn something of a corner, away from being interested in pure pop and toward something more obscure, though still in a similar realm.

That’s probably what’s most interesting to me about more obscure popular music, or any music that attempts to get closer to pop without ever fully wearing the traditional pop wardrobe. There’s a certain palpable friction when you can hear a band stretching to fit into pop attire, bending the sound down toward the three-minute mark, structures that the masses out in Radioland can respond to, as if the sound’s been reshaped by moving in the direction of applause. Who wouldn’t want to find a vaster listenership by creating music that’s more widely appreciated?

While Heaven or Las Vegas is often cited as a Cocteau Twins fan favorite and is easily considered their album with the greatest mainstream appeal and accessibility, the concessions in retrospect are minimal, while the dividends still seem high. Although some might feel this was an artistic compromise, even in a pop setting the album is a daring challenge. Elizabeth Fraser’s intonations of her own devising may be slightly more comprehensible here than elsewhere in Cocteau Twins’ catalog, but tiny islands of comprehensibility make the songs even more elusive in a way, tilting into bliss in order to escape the continual grasp of the listener, rushing into spaces of dazzling disorientation (and escorted there by Robin Guthrie’s ethereal guitars and synthesizers), the same way that having a newborn baby entirely revises one’s sense of focus and being in the world.

From the album's opening track, “Cherry-coloured funk,” the song’s title and darkness-to-light sonic shifts evoke the emotional extremes of new motherhood, feeling excited and overwhelmed by love, re-grounded by life, a more cheerful or “rose-tinted” view rising in the wake of postpartum depression or mere exhaustion. The noticeable trip-hoppy drum loop on “Pitch the baby” underscores its crystal-clear choral line, “I only want to love you.” Of course, “Iceblink luck” features the starkest set of lyrical fragments; semi-audible lines like “burn this whole madhouse down,” “you, yourself and your father,” and “thank you for mending me, baby” all lead into the quietly propulsive “Fifty-fifty clown.” Then, right at the midway point of the album, the glorious, neon-drenched title track pretty much permanently puts cheerfulness back into goth, never to be fully erased again.

Part of what made me want to write about this album was recently seeing the gay French director Christophe Honoré’s latest film, Sorry Angel, and being completely psyched to hear “I wear your ring” suddenly pop up on the movie’s soundtrack during a particularly gorgeous sex scene. What an inspired choice it was. The song’s sound is indelibly bound to dusk and twilight, to nighttime and romance, waltzing through dark waves of glitter “between the sunrise and sunset” to arrive at some kind of agreement or consolation in the presence of someone else in a silent room. “Fotzepolitic” (literally German for “vagina politics”) then takes over like an awakening for “I wear your ring,” both joyful and unbridled. The pulsing “Wolf in the breast” and contemplative “Road, river and rail” move from the intimate interiority of “my baby’s cries” to a sprawling exterior countryside or landscape, with a forlorn figure drifting gently across it in the distance. And finally, the album’s somber closing number, “Frou-frou foxes in midsummer fires,” slowly floats from netherworld to dream-world, which turns out, naturally, to have been the true resting place of Cocteau Twins all along.

18th Annual New Hampshire Film Festival (October 11th - 14th, 2018)

This weekend was my first time attending the New Hampshire Film Festival, which was held at a diverse array of venues in the oceanfront city of Portsmouth. In a year when the political climate here in the United States has felt totally unstable, to say the least, two of the documentaries that I watched in the festival stood out for their intense and absorbing themes of social justice, and I also really loved one of the narrative foreign feature films that I saw in the festival. While both of the documentaries were made in similar styles that were fairly procedural, the serious depth of their powerful and urgent social messages felt so close to the surface that the injustice of the situations presented in them enraged me immediately. Although it’s hard to sit in a theater while feeling overwhelmed by our country’s glaring blind spots, the heroic individuals featured in both documentaries who are working to change things helped to redeem that feeling.

Capturing the Flag, directed by Anne de Mare, focuses on the very timely issue of voter suppression during the 2016 presidential election, when candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump faced off against one another. The film follows and reflects on a group of volunteers — friends and attorneys Laverne Berry and Steven Miller, along with Claire Wright, a recent U.S. citizen who immigrated from South Africa — as they worked to assist voters at the polling locations in North Carolina's Cumberland County on the day of the 2016 election. The film uncovers first-hand how large numbers of African-American and Latino voters were disenfranchised by the voting system and denied their right to vote because their names had been removed from voter registration rosters, or their addresses had been changed to place them in different voting districts. Early in the film, Steven Miller speaks movingly about the fragility of democracy in relation to his ancestors who had died in the Holocaust, and how easy it is for democratic systems to be dismantled and tossed aside by corrupt individuals in positions of power.

Berry, Miller, and Wright stationed themselves in front of separate polling buildings on election day, in order to ask the voters entering the polling stations to let them know if they encountered any problems while trying to cast their votes. At one polling station in North Carolina, over 1,200 people showed up to vote on election day in 2016, but shockingly, only 598 of them were able to cast their votes. When this statistic was revealed on screen late in the film, the entire audience watching the movie at the Portsmouth Music Hall gasped collectively. As election night wound down and the bewildering results of the election began to become clear (including the breaking news report that the state of North Carolina had gone to Trump), all three of the volunteers seemed to lose their sense of faith in a system that could appoint such a malign force to its highest governmental position, yet they all still stressed the importance of continuing their grassroots work to fight that corruption at every future opportunity.

I was equally impressed with the figures in Stephanie Wang-Breal’s documentary Blowin’ Up, which traces the struggles of women arrested for prostitution in Queens, New York, as they face the criminal justice system as victims of human trafficking. The film begins as a woman named Kandie explains that “blowin’ up” means making the decision to leave your pimp, the man who’s controlling your finances, your actions, and your entire life. She mentions that she would often earn over $1,200 on some nights, and that none of the money would be hers to keep, only meals from McDonald’s. In a tragic way, I feel like that’s an analogy for the entire capitalist system itself; as Karl Marx famously described, the secret of profit and wealth in capitalist societies is that workers are systematically underpaid and oppressed by those who exploit their labor. Many of the women arrested who are interviewed in the movie explain that they were trying to work their way out of crushing debt and other financial hardships. A number of women who appear in the film are immigrants from Asian countries who had arrived here with nothing and took jobs working in massage parlors, as a way to have food and shelter, and to try to help their families survive.

To counter these grim realities, Wang-Breal introduces a wide range of remarkable, diligent women working in the criminal justice system — from social workers to attorneys to judges like the Honorable Toko Serita — who have been successful in reforming how prostitution cases are handled in Queens, shifting the courts gradually from a system of diversion and punishment to one that focuses instead on intervention and rehabilitation. Why would a police officer or detective arrange to meet a sex worker at a hotel in order to entrap the woman and make an easy arrest, one legal representative asks, rather than investigating and attempting to intervene? One approach to rehabilitating some women in the community who’d been charged with prostitution was to connect them with an Asian women’s center. For me, the film’s most powerful footage included conversations between one of the arrested women and the director of the women’s center. When she asks the client if she feels that working as a prostitute had violated her human rights, they discuss how everyone should have the right to survive, the right not to be hurt, and the right to be informed. Blowin’ Up offers the viewer an interior, ground-level view of social justice and change related to all of these crucial human-rights issues.

As an admirer of the French director and screenwriter Christophe Honoré’s 2007 threesome-centered musical film Love Songs (Les Chansons d’Amour), I was very excited to see his new gay-themed Parisian movie Sorry Angel (Plaire, Aimer et Courir Vite), which is set in 1993, the year that I was halfway through college and just beginning to come out as gay myself. As a gay man who came of age in the 1980’s and early ’90s, I remember how the specter of HIV and AIDS lingered everywhere by the time 1993 arrived, shadowing every mood and thought and interaction with a sense of remote doom, whether you talked about it openly or not. All of this made watching the absolute wealth of true-to-life details in Sorry Angel feel like I’d lived through something historical, a time in gay life that can now legitimately be seen as history, even though I often felt like I’d have no history as a gay man at that time, as if any real future had already been foreclosed to me and to all of us young gay men back then. Despite having taught a college-level queer history course for nearly twenty years now, I was surprised to feel my own historical memories rising up through the layers of Christophe Honoré’s beautifully made and carefully modulated new film.

Sorry Angel is an ensemble movie that has the feel of an engrossing novel. That makes sense because its 39-year-old central character, Jacques Tondelli (played by Pierre Deladonchamps, who was so memorable in 2013’s Stranger by the Lake), is himself a novelist. Cruisingly, he meets a 22-year-old bisexual university student from Brittany who’s named Arthur (Vincent Lacoste), while the two are watching Jane Campion's The Piano at a movie theatre and wind up sitting beside each other, and then they haltingly move on to having sex and dating, all of the wonderful things that I recall quite well from 1993. During one of their early conversations (and these dialogue-based scenes in the film are among the best that I’ve encountered over the past several years), Arthur asks Jacques, “What do you do in life?” to which Jacques responds, “I head for ruin,” and then, after a beat: “I’m a writer.” Later, Jacques also gives some lessons in literary history to Arthur over the phone — on Whitman and Rimbaud, W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman — during which Arthur even takes notes … and in the middle of a taking a break from a hot hookup with one of his cute friends who’s his own age, no less.

Jacques, who is HIV-positive, sometimes lives with his young son, Louis (Tristan Farge), nicknamed Loulou, whom he had with a close female friend, Isabelle (Sophie Letourneur). Occasionally, Jacques shares his apartment with his friend and ex-lover, Marco (Thomas Gonzalez), who’s now living with full-blown AIDS and slipping downhill fast. The relationship between Jacques and Marco is an honest and heartbreaking one; a bathtub scene between the two, after which Marco admits, “I hurt too much to be in love with anyone,” is sure to become a classic of gay cinema. The same could be said of a much later scene between Jacques, Arthur, and their older gay friend Mathieu (Denis Podalydès), as they dance and drink in the living room, have a long and drunken late-night conversation, then end up humorously in bed together.

Although in this scene Arthur delivers a pointed monologue that comes off sounding a little scripted (as if Christophe Honoré is speaking, rather than the character), and although some of the HIV/AIDS plot elements in the film feel a bit too familiar at times, Sorry Angel is a realistically nuanced and deeply human movie that was also an arrow to the heart for me. I was psyched to hear such inspired and unexpected song choices from the late ’80s and early ’90s intelligently placed throughout the film’s soundtrack, from Cocteau Twins’ “I Wear Your Ring” during Jacques’ and Arthur’s gorgeous, blue-lit initial sex scene, to Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls” during one of Arthur’s fun hookups on the side, to Cowboy Junkies’ slow-burning rendition of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” at one of the movie’s pivotal emotional moments. I also can’t understate my own emotional response to this film. During a scene in the final half-hour, when Arthur does an innocent striptease for Jacques at the foot of his hospital bed, then climbs in beside him and says, “We could make a good life together,” I suddenly started to cry, and I continued crying right through to the end of the film.

Tracy Chapman, Greatest Hits (Elektra Entertainment, 2015)

It’s hard to believe that thirty years have passed since Tracy Chapman released her self-titled debut album in 1988. Several songs on the album — “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution,” “Fast Car,” and “Baby Can I Hold You” — still sound as relevant and timely today as they did when they were recorded. Perhaps that album’s directness and simplicity is one reason why it was a global hit in fifteen countries internationally. The songs wear their messages plainly, delivered in Chapman’s strong yet delicate voice that sounds like nobody else’s, combining elements of old-school blues and contemporary folk with flourishes that approximate world music chants. Chapman got her start busking on the streets and subway platforms in Harvard Square in the mid-’80s, a few years before I arrived in Cambridge myself. Anytime I hear her music, I get the same feeling as when I see a sudden stand of unexpected sunflowers somewhere in the city.

Ever since Chapman’s remastered Greatest Hits compilation was released a few years ago in 2015, it’s the album that I’ve probably listened to most whenever I’m driving around on road trips here in New England. This selection of eighteen songs spans her entire career and distills what’s best about Chapman’s music: its consistency, diversity, and quality that somehow remains quietly outside of what’s typically expected of commercial artists. Her songs usually fall into one of two categories, with lyrics focused either on social consciousness or on love and intimate relationships. Chapman approaches these subjects in similar manners, emphasizing that human interactions in the wider world require a kind of close and caring attention just like romantic relationships do, a commentary on how love and the lack of it have an equal impact across both our public and private spheres.

“Baby Can I Hold You” is a perfect and plaintive example of that balancing act. Chapman’s lyrics straightforwardly take account of a one-way relationship, as the singer’s lover is told that words like “sorry,” “forgive me,” and “I love you” are “all that you can’t say,” even though “baby can I hold you” is spoken freely and frequently. The song’s gentle tone smartly coerces the listener into thinking that this is a love song (and one famously covered by the Irish boyband Boyzone, no less), but on closer inspection, it’s quite the opposite. In our current era, during which sexual and power imbalances have finally come under serious scrutiny, the song’s deeper meaning resonates more fully.

Similarly, I remember hearing Chapman perform her song “The Promise” in concert at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre when I was in college back in 1995. A meditation on lost love and remembrance and waiting for its return, “The Promise” was only the second song into Chapman’s set-list that night, but most of the people sitting around me in the audience were already in tears. It was the only time I ever saw Chapman perform live, and it’s also the last time that I witnessed an artist move listeners so swiftly and collectively. Chapman’s other love songs, like “Open Arms,” “Smoke and Ashes,” and “Sing for You,” still have that kind of effect on me when I hear them today. (There’s also a beautiful denouement on this compilation, Chapman’s solo rendition of “Stand by Me,” performed on The Late Show with David Letterman.)

Chapman’s more political songs, however, are the ones that she’s become best known for recording. She’s always been a protest singer in the classic sense, clear-eyed and fearless in her mission, as well as steadfast and disarming. How is it that her song “Bang Bang Bang” from 1992 isn’t a major anthem for gun control in the United States today? And furthermore, how is it that gun violence in our country has become so much more entrenched and devastating in the years since then? Tracing our culture’s terrible mistakes (“What you go and do / You go and give a boy a gun”), Chapman presciently examines the exploitation of masculinity and police brutality, then escalates her theme profoundly in the song’s final lyrics: “Before you can bridge the gulf between / And embrace him in your arms / Bang bang bang / He’ll shoot you down.”

That these social problems are no closer to being solved is the reason why Chapman sings, in the very first song on her first album, “Don’t you know / They’re talkin’ bout a revolution / It sounds like a whisper.” Nevertheless, such songs as “Subcity,” “Crossroads,” and “All That You Have Is Your Soul” remain potent critiques of the ravages of global capitalism, as well as point-blank takedowns of governmental ineffectuality and malice. No other mainstream songwriter has had the courage to sing, “I’d like to give Mr. President my honest regards / For disregarding me.” Clearly, and painfully, these lyrics have never been more true.

When I posted my list of fifty favorite songs here on my blog a few years ago, I included Chapman’s “Fast Car” on the list, of course. Because of its lyrical ambition and emotional complexity, I think it’s still one of the best folk songs ever recorded in a pop setting. (Some pop acts have done wonderful covers of it, too, like the electronica band Swimming with Dolphins and Mutya Buena of the British girl-group Sugababes.) The song is too close to me and also too legendary to say anything more about it, except that “Fast Car” has done exactly what its closing lines promised; it’s kept driving Tracy Chapman’s music and career through her artistic history, and it will keep doing so right up until pop music’s twilight years.

20th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 13th - 17th, 2018)

I was very excited to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Provincetown International Film Festival this year, and I did so over the past week by watching exactly 20 films in the festival, coincidentally. A number of the filmmakers and attendees whom I met throughout the festival mentioned how much they appreciated being in a peaceful place like Provincetown for a few days, enjoying the films and community, and how grateful they were to have a reason to tune out the ongoing noise of the current political climate in our country. It also makes sense, then, that the films I liked most in this year’s festival were movies with specific and important social justice messages shaping both their themes and aesthetics.

My favorite documentary in this year’s festival was The Gospel of Eureka, directed by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher. I loved its offbeat sensibility and its assured sense of humor, with a narrative voiceover from on high by the fabulous Justin Vivian Bond. The film takes place in the tiny Arkansas town of Eureka Springs, population 2,073, and its focus is as divided as the United States itself has been in recent years. It explores LGBTQ issues on small and large scales, while also detailing the town’s long-standing attraction, a religious theatrical spectacle called The Great Passion Play, which boasts the tallest statue of Jesus Christ in the entire nation. The filmmakers brilliantly intersplice footage of drag entertainers performing at the town’s small gay club with some hilariously eye-popping scenes from the passion play, in order to show the similarities between two seemingly different dramatic experiences and to highlight the inseparability of two apparently disparate ways of life in the Ozarks.

The gay and transgender subjects interviewed in the film are inspiringly down-to-earth, always funny and no-nonsense about their everyday endeavors. When their annual pride parade gets rained on halfway through the day by a thunderstorm of biblical proportions (divine intervention for the lucky filmmakers, no doubt), the participants wait patiently under umbrellas and porches until the rain moves on and the clouds have parted. And one older gay couple who met back in 1986 movingly share their photo album of memories, snapshots of friends who are mostly long gone, recalling their youthful energy and the community they forged against fairly steep odds.

I’d been looking forward to another documentary in the festival, Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers, the mind-blowing tale of triplet brothers Robert Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman, who were separated at birth when adopted by different families and reunited by total chance in 1980. Robert had started school at a community college where Eddy had been enrolled the previous year, so he was stunned as other students on campus kept walking up to him, saying hello, hugging and kissing him. When a friend of Eddy’s who knew he hadn’t returned to the school that year realized that Robert must be Eddy's long-lost identical twin, the pair were reunited at last, and the story was then picked up by local media. David was then amazed to see a photo of his two brothers together in the newspaper, realized he must be the third, and the triplets soon became a much bigger media sensation, even opening their own restaurant together in New York City and popping up as a cameo in a Madonna movie.

After the spirited first half of the documentary when the brothers re-discover each other, which an aunt describes by recounting how they ended up wrestling around on the living room floor like three playful puppies, the film takes a much darker turn at the midway point. As the brothers initiate a search for their birth mother, they also begin to piece together what might have actually occurred to bring about their separation as newborn infants. I don’t want to give too much away, but what follows would make any viewer deeply question the ethics of scientific inquiry, as well as the very nature of identity itself. Do we ever truly know who we are, and if so, how do we know? What role does family play in shaping our identities? How much trust and chance are involved in the process of becoming ourselves? Are there instances in which we shouldn’t trust so easily what the reality of any given situation appears to be?

Similar questions arise in Dawnland, a truly vital and heartbreaking documentary directed by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip. The film closely examines decades of injustice in Native American communities in Maine, where a staggering number of Indian children were forcibly separated from their families of origin and placed into foster care because the state’s social welfare system believed they would be better off raised by non-Indian families, beginning as early as 1940. By 1978, the filmmakers estimate that one in four Indian children in Maine had been placed into foster care. In middle American states like Minnesota, the ratio of Indian children separated from their families has been over 20 times higher than the percentage of non-Indian children placed into foster care.

Far from being surrounded by safer or more civilized upbringings, the reality is that many of the Indian children suffered from neglect, emotional abuse, and physical violence. The gradual revelation of these terrible wrongs prompted the state of Maine’s recent formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which seeks to address this tragic history by meeting with the adults, mostly women, who endured such abuse, formally hearing and recording their testimonies in person. The process of sharing these painful personal stories opens up a communal discussion surrounding massive historical issues like colonization, genocide, institutionalized racism, white privilege, and restorative justice. While the commission had compiled over 150 testimonies by the time the film had been completed, its members acknowledge in their final report that the healing process has only just begun and much more work remains to be done in the future.

Brutality in the world of underprivileged children is represented in an equally powerful and totally different context in Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals, one of my favorite narrative features from this year’s festival. The movie is an innovative and memorable adaptation of Justin Torres’ 2011 semi-autobiographical novel of the same title. Jeremiah is also a former student of mine from a multicultural literature class almost 20 years ago now, so I’m impressed seeing how imaginatively he’s rendered Torres’ prose while re-purposing it for the screen. Although the subject matter will inevitably prompt comparisons to Moonlight, this film’s gritty cinéma vérité style shares more in common with the films of Harmony Korine, augmented by plenty of fantastical moments throughout the movie and phenomenally kinetic hand-drawn animation by Mark Samsonovich.

The story follows three rambunctious young brothers from a Puerto Rican family who’ve moved from the Bronx to an unspecified suburban location outside of New York City. The brothers live as boys will do, roaming around their outer and inner realms, always skirting on the edge of violence, joking, and unconstrained rowdiness. Their parents, a bottling plant worker and night watchman known only as Ma and Paps (potently portrayed by Sheila Vand and Looking’s Raul Castillo, respectively), aren’t much less rowdy than their sons, flirting and fighting, falling out and making up. We see the action mostly through the eyes of Jonah, the youngest brother, in an astounding performance by Evan Rosado, who tags along with his brothers Manny and Joel, then writes about and draws pictures of their adventures in his secret notebook with a flashlight at night underneath the bed they share. There are ample amounts of freedom and danger, as Jonah becomes haltingly aware of his own early sexual awakening and his interest in other boys. Though restrained by class and borderline poverty, the brothers seem hardly aware of it; when their mother slips into a depression and they must fend for themselves, they ransack every last corner of their house until any edible crumbs and drops are gone, driven by sheer willpower to survive. Their house itself is one we also come to know in an almost mythical way, filmed in a golden, hazy light that lifts it far above any feelings of squalor or destitution.

Finally, I’d really anticipated all festival long watching Ondi Timoner’s new biopic Mapplethorpe, the closing night feature, and I was mostly satisfied with the outcome. Despite its reliance on some familiar biopic tropes and conventions, occasionally simplifying complex images and relationships for the sake of clarity, the film also doesn’t shy away from the blunt edges of Robert Mapplethorpe’s life and artwork. Nor does the commanding lead performance of British actor Matt Smith, which feels fully lived-in and completely invested throughout, alternating between toughness and tenderness, just like Mapplethorpe’s photographs themselves often do. Mapplethorpe’s tenacity in defining his renegade aesthetic before his death from AIDS at age 42 in 1989 is something that Matt Smith clearly understands and ably conveys. John Benjamin Hickey is also understatedly seductive and confident as Sam Wagstaff, the art collector who took Mapplethorpe under his wing when he was early in his photographic career. Their love for one another became the central romantic relationship in their lives, even while Mapplethorpe’s relationship with a young Patti Smith, depicted at the start of the film, never quite left him either.

My own relationship to the subject matter of Mapplethorpe has particular relevance for me. I grew up gay in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the curator of the contemporary art museum, Dennis Barrie, was indicted by the city’s government on pornographic charges for bringing Mapplethorpe’s exhibit to the public, including many nude male portraits and sadomasochistic images, a great number of which are fearlessly and fittingly featured in this new biopic. That court case, easily among the most grievous instances of art censorship in American history, unfolded in 1990, during my senior year of high school, and it always made me a little embarrassed thereafter to say that I was from Cincinnati, where such a notoriously conservative scandal had erupted. The most important element of Mapplethorpe himself that the film expertly captures is how he fiercely and artfully kicked down doors of sexual identity and expression that had remained firmly closed until he so courageously opened them.

Five Favorite Soul Albums of the 1980s

Two of the record shops that I frequented back in the 1980s while growing up in Cincinnati were both soul music stores. Just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, Cincinnati was still a somewhat segregated city in that era, even if people were a bit quieter about it in those days. Whenever I stopped in to browse at those two shops, my presence always earned me some interesting looks from the employees and other customers. “What is this skinny white gay kid doing in here?” they seemed to be thinking. But when they noticed over time the kinds of albums that I brought up to the cash register, I gradually earned their respect as someone who knew, even as a younger person, how to select good music from their record bins.

Probably my favorite soul album from the 1980s remains El DeBarge’s self-titled solo debut from 1986. Released by Motown Records founder Berry Gordy on his own Gordy Records imprint, the songs appealed to me for how precisely they rested on the border between R&B and pop, and because no other voice in the realm of pop music has ever sounded exactly like El DeBarge’s voice, a boyishly androgynous and effortlessly smooth croon that was equally at ease in classy ballads and upbeat dance numbers. The roster of production personnel and session players involved in the making of the album includes some of the most accomplished musicians of the day: Burt Bacharach, Michael McDonald, David Foster, Diane Warren, Robbie Nevil, Siedah Garrett, Peter Wolf, Jay Graydon, Robbie Buchanan, Richard Page … and that’s just a small sampling of the list.

The best-known song from the album is the huge radio hit “Who’s Johnny?” (which was featured in the ’80s movie Short Circuit, starring Ally Sheedy and Steve Guttenberg), yet most other songs on the album, like “Secrets of the Night,” “Someone,” and “Lost Without Her Love,” rise to a similar level of radio-readiness, even if hardly anybody else heard them back then. The album reaches its apex with the quiet-storm classic “Love Always,” written and produced by Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager, and Bruce Roberts. And the disc’s perfectly placed closing track, “Don’t Say It’s Over,” suggested that more great things would lay ahead for its songwriter, Diane Warren, back at the start of her career.

Perhaps nobody else was more important to me among ’80s soul singers than Alexander O’Neal and Cherrelle. Clarence Avant’s Tabu Records label was home to both artists, and their finest albums were conceived as full-fledged productions, almost like musicals, complete with spoken introductions and interludes between the songs, all produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the powerhouse duo behind Janet Jackson’s albums. Alexander O’Neal and Cherrelle also recorded two well-received duets together, “Saturday Love” and “Never Knew Love Like This.” I’ll never forget being at a summer block party in Harvard Square a few years ago and hearing “Saturday Love” drifting down the street. I walked over to the DJ booth and said, “You’re playing Alexander O’Neal and Cherrelle!” The DJ instantly smiled and lifted his hand in the air for a high five, as if we were brothers in a secret society.

While Alexander O’Neal’s 1987 LP Hearsay included funky club cuts like “Criticize,” “Fake,” and “The Lovers,” which transcended teenage pop to address more serious adult romantic issues, Cherrelle’s daring 1988 album Affair carried that idea to an entirely different level. Taking its focus of extramarital relations and drawing it out as the album’s lyrical and thematic thread, Affair accomplished something that no other album since then has ever quite matched. The refrain on its fierce title song (“I don’t need commitment, / I don’t need a man to tell me how to feel”) isn’t just a true feminist anthem; it’s also a line that almost every gay man on earth can easily relate to. Other tracks on the album, such as “Looks Aren’t Everything,” “Discreet,” and “Keep It Inside,” have no issue with telling women to pursue romantic and sexual pleasure on their own terms. “Everything I Miss at Home,” my favorite ’80s soul ballad to this day, flat-out celebrates finding contentment outside of a stifling, normative relationship.

Little-known here in the United States, sadly, Hot House’s 1988 album South also should have been more widely appreciated on its home terrain in the United Kingdom. The group’s vocalist, Heather Small, went on to become the frontwoman for dance hitmakers M People a few years later. As the singer for Hot House, she was supported by her co-writer Martin Colyer and co-writer/instrumentalist Mark Pringle. The result is a gorgeous collection of twelve R&B throwback tracks that faithfully resurrect the sonics and vibes of a much earlier time, mixing in elements of blues, country, and gospel. “The Way That We Walk,” “Don’t Come to Stay,” “The Jealous Kind,” and “Me and You” wouldn’t sound out of place in a ’60s jazz club in London’s Soho district or a piano bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. Their superb rendition of Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” is also every bit as good as the original number.

Finally, Jermaine Stewart’s 1986 album Frantic Romantic spawned perhaps the catchiest song of that wonderful decade, the super-sweet and reverent “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off,” the lyrics of which gave all of us lots of room to breathe at the height of the AIDS epidemic (“Let’s get to know each other better, slow and easily … / We don’t have to take our clothes off to have a good time, / We can dance and party all night and drink some cherry wine”). I vividly remember hearing the song alongside an extended dance remix of Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” while dancing up in the balcony of the long-defunct London club G-A-Y at the Astoria Theatre by Tottenham Court Road. The massive, throbbing crowd of several thousand drunken, happy queer revelers went absolutely wild for both songs, which is my favorite dance club memory of all time and always will be, right up until the day I’m gone.

Of course, Frantic Romantic featured other up-tempo numbers like “Dance Floor,” “Jody” (inspired by fellow soul singer Jody Watley), and “Versatile,” as well as the tropically breezy “Moonlight Carnival.” Anyone who watches Jermaine’s choreography in his vintage videos online can delight in the pure class that he always put on display. Tragically, he died in 1997 of AIDS-related complications at age 39 in suburban Chicago, where he had spent his teenage years before his music career took him to many other places around the globe. His gravesite remained unmarked for 17 years until his mother placed a tombstone there in 2014. Etched into the stone are a musical note and staff, the phrase “forever in our hearts,” and beneath his full name and the dates of his birth and death, a single word appears: “BRILLIANCE.”