Flare — A–Z of films

It is the things taken for granted, as much as the things that stand out, which shape the tale.

What emerges over the course of O’Connor’s feature is not a saintly monument but a vibrant, difficult, funny, and unsentimental person.

Filmed over seven years and edited down to just 25 minutes, Body Of Our own is observational in style but full of condensed meaning.

Through archival material and present-day interviews, Kroot traces how the Sisters became a crucial presence in San Francisco, particularly during the AIDS epidemic, when joy, care, protest, and mutual aid were matters of survival rather than branding.

Ribeiro finds something beautiful in fragility and rawness.

The documentary is attentive to contradiction without flattening its subjects into symbols.

Along with Vladimir Gojun’s progressively rhythmic editing and Julij Zornik’s subjective sound design, the filmmaker takes us right into the protagonist’s, and therefore any and every teenager’s head.

On the technical level, Jacques Girault’s usually hand-held cinematography keeps the immediacy of associated with that choice, but never slips into “chaos cinema” shakiness.

The kind of film that seems to drift rather than move in straight lines, guided by intuition, memory and the pull of recurring images.

Arregi and Goenaga are at pains to suggest that no matter what your political or sexual stance, we’re all human underneath.

Desire does not arrive here as a clean break from domestic life. It appears as a tremor inside it.

Finds its strength in the subtlety of the writing and the power of the understated performances.

Does an important job in putting these pieces together and in documenting their meaning at this point in history.

The constant contrast is the trick, which later extends to the emotional stakes.

While interesting from a historical point of view... it's not a great watch.

Alice Maio Mackay’s...most accessible film to date.

This film is well aware of its own limitations: knows it can only pose the questions here, while answers will take time and belong, perhaps, to later generations.

It does not explain trans pain from the outside. It sits with it, listens to it, and tries to make room for it without exploiting it.