With actors in challenging roles and filmmakers crafting provocative drama, comedies and documentaries, 2013 was another Queer Year for Film. Here’s a rundown of queer films and trends, including the good, the better and the best — as well as the worst — of 2013.
Best Queer Film of the Year
“Blue Is the Warmest Color.” It was three hours long. It had explicit lesbian sex scenes. It won big at Cannes. And it’s a masterpiece: an intimate, erotic and ecstatic romantic drama that captures issues of self-worth and self-expression in ways that are both authentic and devastating. Plus, lead actor Adèle Exarchopoulos gives a phenomenal performance.
Trans Performance By a Non-Trans Actor
Best in a Good Film: Jared Leto will likely score an Oscar nomination for his terrific portrayal of Rayon in the AIDS drama “Dallas Buyers Club.”
Best in a Bad Film: Kate del Castillo’s scenery-chewing performance as a trans inmate in “K-11” wasn’t bad — in fact, she was quite entertaining as the LGBT cell’s queen bee. But this lurid drama directed by Jules Stewart (Kristen’s mom) was a mess.
Murderous Lesbians and Queer Twists
Worst: “Side Effects” had the negative effect of having one of its big plot twists be that two characters were murderous lesbians. The film irresponsibly equated lesbianism with venality.
Best: Out filmmaker Jamie Babbit made the far-more-interesting — and tricky — “Breaking the Girls,” in which two women fall in love and exchange murders (a la “Stranger on a Train”) only for the delicious twists and double-crosses to begin!
Documentaries of the Year
Best: “Call Me Kuchu” presented a wake-up call for LGBT rights in Uganda and a commemoration of the work — and murder — of African queer activist David Kato. This blistering documentary about how LGBT individuals survive and even thrive in a country where being gay is illegal shone a bright light on its brave subjects. Another fine doc, “God Loves Uganda,” also addressed the issue of being queer in Africa.
Honorable mentions: “Valentine Road,” about the shocking aftermath of a gay hate crime, and “After Tiller,” about late-term abortionists (one of whom is a lesbian).
Beat Films
Three films this year portrayed the Beats.
Worst: “Kill Your Darlings,” in which Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) falls in love with and under the spell of the murderous Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), was an ambitious but largely unsuccessful effort to capture the early Beats.
Better: “On the Road” was Walter Salles’ earnest adaptation of the Kerouac classic. Sam Riley’s Sal Paradise and Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarity were respectfully the Kerouac and Cassidy characters. This handsomely mounted drama captured the restless spirit with mixed results.
Best: “Big Sur,” featuring Jean-Marc Barr as an older, alcoholic Kerouac, is both beautifully filmed and superbly acted, making it the Beat film to beat.
Short Films
American: “Alaska is a Drag,” which features Leo (Martin L. Washington, Jr.), a tough but flamboyant gay African-American man, making an unexpected new friend in Declan (Spencer Broschard) at the cannery where he works. While the tone, which oscillates between hard-edged realism and dreamlike flights of fancy, is familiar, this winning short gets deep into the characters, thanks to Washington’s fantastic turn. “Alaska is a Drag” begs for feature treatment.
International: “Holden,” a Spanish/French import, is an absolutely magical short that captures an entire romance in 20 minutes. Sexy, funny, heartfelt and heartbreaking, writer Juan Arcones, who co-directed with Roque Madid, chronicles a photographer (Juan Trueba) and an actor (Xavier Lafitte) who meet and spend a memorable night together.
Sexist: In the visually stylish and highly erotic “Fire Island, 1979,” Patrick McGuinn directed Todd Verow, who wears only a salt-and-pepper mustache. Verow becomes Chase Hook, a deceased (and fictional) porn director, whose answering machine reflects his life. Home-movie footage shows him cavorting naked in the water, on the beach and in the pines, which may cause viewers to writhe in ecstasy, not unlike Hook does in the sand.
Teen Spirit
Good: The girls in “Spring Breakers” shared some same-sex kisses while Marc (Israel Broussard) in “The Bling Ring” loved those heels he stole.
Very Good: Emory Cohen gave a knockout performance as a gay teen who has a date with a much older, married African-American man (Wendell Pierce) in the remarkable drama “Four.”
Best: The gay couple, Luis (Luis Figueroa) and Brandon (Brandon Diaz), shine in the enchanting comedy-drama “The We and the I.” The treatment of these queer students seen on a long bus ride home was truly honest, with the couple’s sexuality never sensationalized or demeaned.
Gay Directors, Straight Films
Good: Bill Condon’s “Fifth Estate” was an entertaining-enough drama about Julian Assange, but it never quite reached the depths it might have plumbed.
Best: Lee Daniel’s “The Butler” was a remarkable history of civil rights in America as seen through the eyes of a White House butler, played by Forest Whitaker, although it contained no queer content.
Gay Directors, Gay Films
Best: Spanish bad-boy Pedro Almodóvar created one of his funniest and gayest films in decades with “I’m So Excited,” about a trio of gay flight attendants attending to panic-stricken first-class passengers when their landing gear fails.
Honorable Mention: François Ozon’s splendid “In the House” was a return to queer storytelling for the out auteur. He tells the complex but seductive story of a student who engages his professor by chronicling the events of his gay friend’s household.
Pornographic Content
Mediocre: “Lovelace,” made by gay filmmakers Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein, was about the meteoric rise to fame of porn star Linda Lovelace and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband. It had some good elements, but never quite grabbed viewers by the throat.
Best: “The Canyons,” by straight filmmaker Paul Schrader, who worked from a script by the gay Bret Easton Ellis, told of a stylish, sordid love triangle featuring bad behavior and bared bodies — Lindsay Lohan and James Deen among them.
Most Promising Newcomers
Male: Wentworth Miller not only came out publicly this year, he also penned a wicked script for the stylish and sinister thriller “Stoker.”
Female: Stacie Passion offered a notable directorial debut with the absorbing lesbian drama “Concussion.”
Missed in Philly
Best: “Una Noche” is an absorbing Cuban drama that concerns three teenagers in a love triangle — Lila (Anailían de la Rúa de la Torre), her gay twin brother Elio (Javier Núñez Florián) and Raul (Dariel Arrechaga), Elio’s friend,and the object of his crush. Writer/director Lucy Mulloy’s film feels incredibly authentic; she duly captures the oppression from the heat, poverty and the law that informs and weighs upon her characters’ lives. The film palpably conveys the sexual and emotional tensions the teens face as they drift towards Miami on a homemade raft. This extended sequence is particularly gripping. Now out on DVD.
Worst: Directed by James Franco, “Sal” is less a biopic and more a lousy mood piece that chronicles the last day of Sal Mineo’s life. More enervating than illuminating and consisting of inscrutable and interminable passages of Sal (Val Lauren) on the phone, driving and working out, viewers may become impatient waiting for Mineo to be murdered. Franco’s vague film asks audiences to piece together the gay actor’s life from hints about dinner theater and film projects, as well as potential boyfriends and mentions of James Dean, but ultimately this film fails to do its fascinating subject justice.
The (Rear) End
There is always a question about the sexiest queer film or the work with the best nude scene. While Matthew McConaughey’s character in “Dallas Buyers Club” instructs the medical establishment to kiss his naked ass, it was not seductive. And it would be tough to choose between the actors in the three Beat films: studly Garrett Hedlund answering a door in the altogether in “On the Road,” adorable Daniel Radcliffe displaying his cute caboose in “Kill Your Darlings” or the uninhibited Jean-Marc Barr showing off his divine behind in “Big Sur.” All these guys have attractive asses. But it’s no contest, because the sexiest film this year was “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” featuring Adèle Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, who bared their derrieres along with their souls.