To celebrate Pride Month, our editors hand pick twenty-five examples of unsung queer cinema that don’t often crop up on June listicles.
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As Pride Month draws to a close, we wanted to ask, what are the great queer films that rarely make it onto the obligatory listicles in June? We decided to make our own list of twenty-five films we treasure that deserve mentioning amongst the classics (both modern and otherwise) of queer film.
This list stretches back all the way to 1978, although note that the majority of entries come from the past ten years. That’s the timeframe that Seventh Row has been running and covering queer film festivals, from Frameline to InsideOut and beyond. Every year, we discover gems amongst these festival’s lineups that don’t always end up getting wider recognition. If you want to keep up with our future coverage of queer film festivals, we suggest you click here to sign up for our free, weekly streaming newsletter.
Nighthawks (Ron Peck, 1978)
Ron Peck’s little-seen Nighthawks was an early, frank depiction of life as a gay man in ‘70s Britain, complete with an on-screen appearance by Derek Jarman. Ken Robertson plays Jim, an English teacher of about thirty who hides his sexuality by day and goes out clubbing to pick up men in the evenings. It’s been years since I saw Nighthawks, and thinking back to it now, the first thing I remember about the film is the entrancing, protracted dance scenes. Peck takes his time observing how Jim navigates the dance floor, interacting with men on a purely physical level since the loud music doesn’t allow for much conversation. These primal pleasures are contrasted with the genuinely frightening anxiety Jim faces about being outed to his class, which could mean being fired. It’s a film that’s hypnotic to watch, and never melodramatic, although it’s not without its harsh realities. Orla Smith
Nighthawks is available on Fandor and Kanopy in Canada and the US, and BFI Player in the UK.
Young Soul Rebels (Isaac Julien, 1991)
Another British entry to this list is Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels, also set in the ‘70s, but made several decades after Nighthawks. Julien’s film follows two young Black men, Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and Caz (Mo Sesay), as well as Chris’s girlfriend, Tracy (Sophie Okonedo). It’s a complex exploration of class and racial tensions, sexuality, and clashing cultural movements, all wrapped up in a coming-of-age tale. Best friends Chris and Caz are soulboys (a youth subculture that celebrated American soul and funk music) who run a pirate radio station together. The death of their friend, who was murdered while cruising for sex, sets off a rift in their relationship, especially since Caz is gay himself and developing feelings for a white boy, Billibud (Jason Durr). It’s a distressing and angry film at times, but also one that has so much love for its characters. OS
Young Soul Rebels is available on BFI Player, Sky Go, and Now TV in the UK.
Beautiful Thing (Hettie Macdonald, 1996)
Hettie Macdonald was much-praised last year for directing the latter half of the miniseries Normal People. But some British audiences already knew and loved her from her queer cult classic, Beautiful Thing, an incredibly sweet love story between two teen boys in South London. The film follows Jamie (Glen Berry) and Ste (Scott Neal), two working class boys facing bullying at school and at home, who find refuge in each other. While the film acknowledges the harsher side of being a gay teen in the ‘90s, what’s so refreshing about it is how cute, wholesome, and ultimately joyful it is, especially for a film released at the tail end of the AIDS crisis. It’s often silly, always warm, and has such a vivid sense of place that will be recognisable to anyone who’s ever lived in South London. OS
Beautiful Thing is available to rent in the US and to rent on BFI Player in the UK.
Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, 2007)
Céline Sciamma first feature, Water Lilies, instantly announced a major new talent. Right from the start, Sciamma was telling stories about women and their bodies, something I’d rarely ever seen before. The film centres around Marie (Pauline Acquart), who becomes infatuated with the beautiful Floriane (Adèle Haenel), a synchronised swimmer on the same team as Marie’s best friend, Anne (Louise Blachère). All three girls’ lives are defined by their relationship to boys: how boys see them and treat them, how they want to be seen, or how both affect their relationships with other girls. The girls’ body types affect how they are treated by both boys and other girls. Marie is skinny and boyish and thus practically invisible, meaning she can move through the world as an observer. Floriane is developed and womanly meaning she’s treated like a sexual object by boys and men, assigned a level of sexual maturity and interest she doesn’t feel herself. And the tall and voluptuous Anne feels ostracised for failing to conform to conventional beauty standards.
The film is full of excruciating but familiar moments: Anne waiting for her entire team to leave before changing lest they glimpse her body; Marie reacting to Floriane’s push-pull of flirtation and abandonment with confusion; and Floriane teasing Marie by invading her personal space and then disappearing to kiss a boy. But there are tender moments, too: Anne and Marie sharing a bike ride home together; Floriane and Marie staring at the ceiling together in Floriane’s bedroom. Alex Heeney
Water Lilies is available to purchase on DVD but not to stream or rent.
Read more about Water Lilies in our ebook, Portraits of resistance: The cinema of Céline Sciamma.
Listen to our podcast episode comparing Jennifer’s Body and Water Lilies.
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (Madeleine Olnek, 2012)
The hilarious Madeleine Olnek’s first entry on this list is Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, a film exactly as weird as its title. This ultra-low budget, black-and-white comedy follows Zoinx (Susan Ziegler), an alien from outer space who visits Earth and falls in love with Jane (Lisa Haas), a shy greeting card store employee. The special effects are very visibly homemade and ramshackle (deliberately so), and the aliens, from Zoinx to her peers Zylar and Barr, are bizarre fish out of water, speaking in totally flat monotone throughout the entire film. The whole film is charming out there. I rarely literally laugh out loud in films, but this one had me roaring. OS
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien is available to rent on VOD in Canada, the US, and the UK.
Watch our masterclass with Madeleine Olnek and Anne Émond.
Tom at the Farm (Xavier Dolan, 2013)
Xavier Dolan’s least seen and most restrained film, Tom at the Farm, is also his best. Part slow burn psychological thriller, part camp, part comedy, part “what is even going on right now”, it’s always entertaining, mostly convincing, and positively gorgeous. André Turpin’s cinematography captures the yellows, greens, and browns of the cornfields, costumes, and decor at the farm. That’s where the eponymous Tom (Dolan) goes to visit the mother and brother of his recently deceased lover, Guillaume. The formal precision, wide shots, and relatively (for Dolan) slow pace are still recognizably Dolan thanks to the just-a-bit-too-fast cutting.
Like most Dolan films, this is another story of a very dysfunctional family, where everyone’s lives pivot around the matriarch. We soon learn that Guillaume wasn’t out to his family, and Tom suddenly finds himself recruited by Guillaume’s brother, Francis, to help maintain the lie that Guillaume was dating a woman. Guillaume’s mother, Agathe, is so keen to hear about what her son’s girlfriend had to say about him that Tom ends up expressing his own feelings under the guise of the girlfriend — first, through romantic, poetic expressions, and then through very precise descriptions of how much he loved licking Guillaume’s armpits. Dolan takes wild swings with tone, where Francis can be pulling Guillaume into an exhilarating and romantic tango dance one minute, choking him with sexual yet predatory fervour the next, and removing his tires so he can’t leave soon after. AH
Tom at the Farm is available on Crave in Canada, and Kanopy in Canada and the US.
Lilting (Hong Khaou, 2014)
From our review: “Is there anything Ben Whishaw can’t do? In Lilting, he gives yet another awards-worthy performance as Richard, whose lover Kai recently died, leaving Richard responsible for Kai’s mother, Junn (Pei-Pei Cheng). When Richard first visits Junn in her home for the elderly after Kai’s death, he discovers that she has a new English lover. Despite moving to England thirty years ago, she never learned the language. Keen to help her out, he engages an amateur translator (Naomi Christie) to help them communicate, which also gives Richard an excuse to visit and work out how to proceed.” Read the full review.
Lilting is available on Kanopy in Canada and the US.
Closet Monster (Stephen Dunn, 2015)
From the introduction to our interview with Dunn: “Set in St. John’s Newfoundland, Closet Monster tells the story of high school senior Oscar (Connor Jessup), who dreams of moving to New York City to be a makeup artist in film. Although he’s never responded positively to his female best friend’s sexual advances, he has trouble coming to terms with his own sexuality, scarred since childhood from witnessing a hate crime. The film tells the story of his sexual awakening and self-actualization, as he struggles to deal with his broken family, helped by his trusty hamster (voiced by Isabella Rosselini).” Read the full interview.
Closet Monster is available on Crave, Tubi, and CBC Gem in Canada, and Kanopy in Canada and the US.
The Royal Road (Jenni Olson, 2015)
From the introduction to our interview with Olson: “How do you tell a love story that never begins or ends, completely? In The Royal Road, queer film scholar Jenni Olson explores her lifelong attraction to women who don’t love her back. Through a series of 16 mm landscapes, the movie tracks Olson’s journey from her home in San Francisco to her beloved’s doorstep in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, in a matter-of-fact voiceover, Olson discusses nostalgia in Vertigo, the catharsis of fiction, and the politics of (mis)remembering California’s colonial history. The ground she covers is more psychological than geographical; by the end, we feel we know the “real” Olson, her obsessions and strength.” Read the full interview.
The Royal Road is available on Criterion Channel and Kanopy in Canada and the US.
Summertime (Catherine Corsini, 2015)
In Catherine Corsini’s 1970s-set Summertime, Delphine (Izïa Higelin) falls for the cosmopolitan Carole (Cécile De France) when she accidentally finds herself in the middle of a women’s rights protest in France. As a girl from the country, where women do the same hard labour as men without decision making privileges, the concept of feminism is entirely new to Delphine. The outspoken women in the group like Carole are exotic, grown up, and exciting.
Though there’s an obvious attraction between the two and plenty of lesbians within the group, Carole has a hard time coming to terms with her feelings — she lives with her boyfriend and can’t imagine life as a lesbian. When Delphine gets called home to care for the family farm because of her father’s illness, she transforms from a woman entirely sure of her sexuality to one who sneaks around behind her mother’s back. Corsini captures the era’s lack of women’s rights and opportunities and women’s were just as constraining as homophobia. It’s not always clear which is the driving force behind Delphine’s struggles, and Corsini is comfortable in that ambiguity. AH
Summertime is available on Kanopy in Canada and the US.
Catfight (Onur Tukel, 2016)
Sandra Oh and Anne Heche are at the top of their game in Catfight, an absurdist comedy that pushes its premise to the extremes. It’s best to go in knowing as little as possible, since the film takes its setup — two former college friends reignite their rivalry — in all sorts of unexpected directions. It’s delightful to see two actresses who so rarely get roles worthy of their talent given such meaty roles: they get to literally rip into each other, verbally sparring just as much as they physically fight, and being absolutely hilarious the whole time. The film is queer both in the sense that you can read queerness into their rivalry, and because Heche’s character is married to a woman. That also means that we get a third underappreciated actress thrown into the mix to play her wife: Alicia Silverstone. OS
Catfight is available on Netflix in the US and the UK.
A Date for Mad Mary (Darren Thornton, 2016)
A Date for Mad Mary is part lesbian romance, part coming-of-ager about coming out and growing out of your friends. When Mary (Seána Kerslake) gets out of her short stint in prison, she finds her world has changed: her best friend is getting married and has moved on to new, heteronormative friendships with people she doesn’t see as fuck-ups. Mary’s coming out is about not just coming to terms with her sexuality, but also with who she is and who she wants around her. It’s through romance that she learns to love herself and find a way forward, away from her toxic friendships. AH
A Date with Mad Mary is available on Tubi in Canada and the US, and Prime in the US.
In Between (Maysaloun Hamoud, 2016)
Although Maysaloun Hamoud’s first feature, In Between, is only tangentially a “queer film” — one of the three protagonists is a lesbian trying to navigate her conservative muslim family — the film is a delight. Set in Jerusalem, the film follows three Palestinian women flatmates who don’t quite fit into society. Leila (Mouna Hawa), a lawyer, is the most modern, but she finds it near impossible to find a man who is open-minded enough to handle her. Salma (Sana Jammelieh) is a lesbian who is out among her friends, but her parents are still trying to set her up with a husband, which becomes particularly problematic when she falls in love. Noor (Shaden Kanboura) is the most conservative of the group, the only one to wear a hijab. She’s engaged to be married, but starts questioning her faith and culture when her fiance commits a brutal act that she can’t even talk about without risking her own safety and future happiness. Together, these women support each other and help each other navigate the murky waters of being outsiders in another culture and emancipated feminists in a world that hasn’t quite caught up to their values. AH
In Between is available on Hoopla and Kanopy in Canada and the US, and Film Movement in the US.
Paris 05:59: Théo and Hugo (Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, 2016)
Paris 5:59: Théo and Hugo opens with a 20-minute group sex scene at a sex club in Paris, and it’s utterly thrilling. Slowly, directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau let us notice Théo (Geoffrey Coueët) and Hugo (François Nambot) noticing each other, and enjoying themselves enough to decide to go home together. As they bike home together to continue what they started at the club, things come to a screeching halt when Hugo casually announces that he penetrated Théo without a condom. Théo starts to panic, and immediately calls the AIDS helpline to figure out what they should do; that’s when we learn that Théo is HIV positive, though he has a low viral load.
What follows is a precise procedural about what happens when you find out you’ve had unprotected sex and have to rush to the uninviting sterile environs of a hospital, hoping for good news. Since Théo insists on joining Hugo at the hospital, we watch as the two fight and then bond over the experience, and as Hugo slowly becomes more worried. The film plays out in real time, over the course of just a couple of hours, as a relationship buds, gets cut short, and then blooms again. Though better at the procedural element than it is at character development, Théo and Hugo showcases thrilling taut filmmaking that shows just how far we’ve come since the AIDS crisis, and just how scary things still continue to be even now that HIV isn’t a death sentence. One can only hope that with the current clinical trials for an mRNA HIV vaccine, the film will soon feel like a period piece. AH
Paris 05:59: Théo and Hugo is available on Tubi in Canada and the US, and BFI Player in the UK.
We speak about Paris 05:59: Théo and Hugo on our AIDS on screen podcast episode.
Good Manners (Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas, 2017)
This is how you do a creature feature right. Brazilian filmmakers Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas’s Good Manners is a visually sumptuous, fantastical film with incredible practical effects, hypnotic set pieces, and unexpected twists — all of which stem from a compelling emotional core. That core is the friendship-turned-romance between isolated pregnant woman Ana (Marjorie Estiano) and her live-in maid, Clara (Isabél Zuaa), who begins to realise there’s something not quite right about Ana. The film explores pregnancy and motherhood in an uncommonly complex way, using body horror to express Ana’s fear of losing agency over her body to the baby that’s inside of her. OS
Good Manners is available on Kanopy in Canada, Mubi in Canada and the UK, and Kanopy and OVID in the US.
Princess Cyd (Stephen Cone, 2017)
Stephen Cone’s Princess Cyd is the story of a queer teenage girl, Cyd (Jessie Pinnick), and her aunt, Miranda (Rebecca Spence) navigating their sexual and religious identities during a summer spent together in Chicago. The open, athletic, and chatty Cyd — who doesn’t read — quickly clashes with her quiet, famous author aunt who hasn’t been in her life for years; Miranda’s seriousness about her religion causes further clashes because Cyd is less sure of her spirituality. Cyd has a boyfriend back home but quickly falls for Mohawked barista Katie (Malic White). Over the course of three weeks, Cyd and Miranda talk, go to the beach, hang out with Miranda’s friends, and slowly find a way to connect. It’s a sweet and lovely film about two lonely people finding something in each other. Better still, Cone fully fleshes out the community around them. AH
Princess Cyd is available on Kanopy and Tubi in Canada and the US, Hulu in the US, and Prime in the US and UK.
Watch our masterclass with Stephen Cone and Ashley McKenzie.
Genèse (Philippe Lesage, 2018)
From the introduction to our interview with Lesage: “In a whirlwind of emotions, our teenage years are dominated by the weight of the moment; nothing seems more important than what is happening right now. Perspective is lost in the formation of identities, and just as we’ve moved past childhood, we begin to enter the mysterious world of adults. Genèse exists in a transient emotional landscape, examining the parallel fates of a brother and sister, Guillaume (Théodore Pellerin) and Charlotte (Noée Abita), who are navigating love and identity in their late adolescence. While, on the surface, this is a traditional coming-of-age tale, a melodrama of hormonal lust and self-discovery, it abandons traditional point A to point B storytelling.” Read the full interview.
Genèse is available on Mubi in Canada, Hoopla and Kanopy in the US and Canada, and Film Movement in the US.
Get a copy of our ebook The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook to read more about Genèse.
Giant Little Ones (Keith Behrman, 2018)
From the introduction to our interview with Behrman: “Giant Little Ones is one of the great teen movies of the decade — vibrant, fun, and moving. And yet writer-director Keith Behrman also manages to tackle weighty issues without ever veering into afternoon special territory or getting didactic.
Everything seems to be going great for Franky (Josh Wiggins) who is about to turn 16: he’s inseparable from this best friend, Ballas, bonded to his swim team, and the hottest girl in school, Priscilla (Hailie Kittle), not only likes him but is actively trying to have sex with him. The film moves at such a breakneck speed that it’s easy to miss — or ignore — all the beats indicating something isn’t quite right: Franky is avoiding his newly out father (Kyle MacLachlan), concerned about his lonely single mother (Maria Bello), idly standing by while homophobic bullying happens, and unable to quite talk to Natasha (Taylor Hickson), Ballas’ sister for whom Franky clearly carries a torch.” From the full interview.
Giant Little Ones is available on CBC Gem in Canada, and Kanopy in Canada and the US.
Get a copy of our ebook The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook to read more about Giant Little Ones.
House of Hummingbird (Kim Bora, 2018)
House of Hummingbird announces a major directorial talent in Kim Bora. It’s a sprawling coming-of-age tale about fourteen-year-old Eun-hee (Ji-hu Park), a lost and lonely young girl looking for connection in 1994 Seoul. Eun-hee and the characters around her are so vivid, I almost felt like the film needed a miniseries length to let us live and breathe with them in the way that Bora wants us to. Still, you’ll root for Eun-hee to find herself as she looks for direction in many different places, including in sweet flirtations with other girls her age. OS
House of Hummingbird is available on Prime and Hoopla in Canada and the US.
Rafiki (Wanuri Kahiu, 2018)
From the introduction to our interview with Kahiu: “Cannes Film Festival premieres are typically eagerly awaited for their big name auteurs – but Wanuri Kahiu’s debut feature, Rafiki, was hotly anticipated for completely different reasons. It’s a Kenyan film about a lesbian romance and was thus banned from its native country, where homosexuality is illegal. The ban was recently temporarily lifted, allowing Kahiu’s film to be screened for a seven-day window that made it eligible to be selected as Kenya’s foreign language Oscar submission (although it eventually lost out to Seventh Row favourite Supa Modo).
It’s frustrating that Rafiki’s political importance means discussions of its quality as a film have been set to one side. It’s a low-key delight: Kahiu has crafted a sweet and winning romance with charm to spare. The love between Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) and Ziki (Sheila Munyiva) has the pure and excitable energy of a teen romance. Their lows are harsher and more dangerous than your typical rom-com, but the butterfly highs of fresh infatuation and connecting deeply with another person are just as exhilarating.” Read the full interview.
Rafiki is available on Hoopla and Kanopy in Canada and the US, and Showtime in the US.
Wild Nights with Emily (Madeleine Olnek, 2018)
In the last few years, Emily Dickinson has suddenly become a major preoccupation of cinema. Despite being a beloved poet, her life had never been depicted on screen — until Terence Davies’ 2016 Dickinson biopic, A Quiet Passion, which we explored in a Special Issue. Since then, we’ve had the (in my mind superior) Wild Nights with Emily, and a TV series, Dickinson, starring Hailee Steinfeld. There seems to be something about Dickinson’s reclusive but brilliant life that speaks to the here and now. Perhaps, in a time of increased affirmative action for women in the creative arts, we’re attracted to the tragedy of a genius woman whose work wasn’t appreciated until after her death.
Wild Nights, unlike A Quiet Passion, acknowledges the overwhelming evidence that Dickinson (here played by Molly Shannon) was a queer woman. Restored letters reveal that she and her brother’s wife were lovers for decades. Dickinson is often portrayed as a staid, antisocial woman who rarely left the solitude of her room. Writer-director Madeleine Olnek rewrites this narrative. Her Dickinson is full of life: she’s prickly, but also funny and, of course, gloriously intelligent — all is true of Olnek’s film, too. Although it is carefully period accurate, the film feels more modern than Davies’, perhaps due to its frank approach to its central queer relationship. Dickinson and her lover’s relationship is not depicted demurely or treated as transgressive. They’ve been together for decades, so they speak to each other and touch each other with the casual familiarity of any married couple. Crucially, the film doesn’t turn Dickinson into a purely tragic figure, focusing on the relationship that brought joy to her life. OS
Wild Nights with Emily is available to stream on Kanopy in Canada and the US, and Hulu in the US.
Watch our masterclass with Madeleine Olnek and Anne Émond.
End of the Century (Lucio Castro, 2019)
Lucio Castro’s directorial debut, End of the Century, starts out like an Iberian sequel to Weekend, only to become a kind of post-modern exploration of love, sex, intimacy, and possible lives. Two men repeatedly cross paths in Barcelona and eventually, after what one of them refers to as a “chess game” of sending signals, fall into bed together. Ocho, an Argentinian poet (Juan Barberini) who makes his living in advertising in New York City, is renting an AirBnB in the city for a vacation; Javi (Ramon Pujol) is a local. Intimate conversation follows the sex, and the long, uninterrupted takes feel like familiar territory. But when Javi drops that they have actually met before, we suddenly cut quickly back in time for the film’s second act: to that meeting a decade previously, when they spent a day together, sharing stories, looking at art, and possibly going to bed together.
Castro is constantly surprising us, with each new act deepening the characters and the film’s philosophical explorations. Just when we expect Castro to return us to the present, he zags again, and we suddenly find Javi and Ocho living in the now homey and lived-in AirBnB apartment (fridge filled, signs of nesting) with a child, yet neither of them are older. Have we jumped forward in time? Or was the film’s first act a look at what their lives could have looked like had they been only a passing fancy to one another? There’s a kind of dream logic to this film about hopes, dreams, and shared lives, which I won’t spoil. But suffice to say, you’ll leave the film arguing about what it all meant, knowing the characters like friends, and desperate to watch it all again. AH
End of the Century is available to stream on Dekoo in the US and BFI Player in the UK.
We speak about End of the Century on our finite romances podcast episode (members exclusive).
Lingua Franca (Isabel Sandoval, 2019)
From our review: “Actor-director Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca provides a quietly subversive reframing of a trans woman’s experience. The film follows Olivia (Sandoval), an undocumented Filipina immigrant working in Brooklyn who is desperately trying to attain a green card while caring for an elderly Jewish-Russian woman, Olga (Lynn Cohen). She begins to form a relationship with the woman’s grandson, Alex (Eamon Farren), a troubled and dissatisfied young man who has taken a job at his uncle’s meat-packing business.” Read the full review.
Lingua Franca is available to stream on Netflix in Canada and the US.
No Ordinary Man (Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase Joynt, 2020)
From the introduction to our interview with Chin-Yee and Joynt: “How do you shoulder the responsibility of creating the first moving image representations of a person who is no longer with us? What’s more, in the case of trans jazz musician Billy Tipton, how do you make a documentary about a figure whose legacy has been distorted by mainstream media for decades after their death? It’s a responsibility that co-directors Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt didn’t take lightly.
The story No Ordinary Man tells is one of lost transgender history that’s finally being reclaimed. The film’s subject is Billy Tipton, an influential jazz musician who worked between the 1930s and 1970s. It wasn’t until 1989, when Tipton died in the arms of his son, Billy Jr., that Tipton’s family and the public discovered that he was assigned female at birth. After his death, Tipton’s story was twisted: Tipton was unequivocally a trans man, but the cis-dominated media presented him as a woman who dressed as a man in order to get a foot in the door in the music industry. Even the most cited text about Tipton’s life, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton by Dianne Middlebrook, framed his story around this harmful narrative.” Read the full interview.
Listen to our podcast episode comparing No Ordinary Man to John Ware Reclaimed.
No Ordinary Man is available on VOD in Canada and will be released in mid July in the US.
Summerland (Jessica Swale, 2020)
Jessica Swale’s directorial debut, Summerland, is a tear-jerker British period piece that yanks your heart. That’s largely on the strength of Gemma Arterton’s central performance as a misanthropic writer pining after her lost love (an excellent Gugu Mbatha-Raw who is so good you wish she had more screen time). Arterton’s Alice is so headstrong and uninterested in being liked that it’s easy to fall head-over-heels for this unconventional heroine in an otherwise quite conventional film. With recent roles in films like The Escape, Their Finest, and Vita & Virginia, Arterton has quickly become one of the most exciting British actresses to watch, taking on complex female roles. Summerland is no exception. The film is penned by Swale who also wrote Nell Gwynn, the play for which Arterton received an Olivier and Evening Standard nomination. AH
Summerland is available to stream on Netflix in Canada and Showtime in the US.
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