Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

First queer love is all about projection. We’ve seen this in many a gay movie. A character, previously closeted to the world and even themself, meets someone, falls in love, and through this person emerges anew. Sometimes the love itself is easy to believe in. Desert Hearts for one. But often, the love was never the point. Call Me By Your Name, Pariah, classics like Lianna — it’s not about the romance, it’s about what the romance reveals.

On Swift Horses is an unconventional queer love story. The person Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) first meets is not a lover, it’s not even a woman — it’s her soon-to-be brother-in-law Julius (Jacob Elordi). She’s drawn to him and doesn’t know why. She’s so drawn to him she finally agrees to marry his brother Lee (Will Poulter) just to remain in Julius’ life.

Shifting in time across the 1950s and in place from rural Kansas to San Diego, Las Vegas to Tijuana, this is a movie with many threads. Muriel’s journey shares equal weight with Julius’ own love story with a fellow gambler named Henry (Diego Calva). As Julius strives to finally find identity outside himself, Muriel strives for the opposite. They’re on parallel journeys but at very different points in a queer life.

This doesn’t mean Muriel’s queerness remains theoretical. She has meaningful encounters with a woman at the horse track (Kat Cunning) who invites her to a queer bar and with her neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle) who has a vibrant queer community. True to the time, queerness may be in the shadows, but in the darkness it is plentiful.

And yet neither of these potential romances for Muriel are as telling as the moment when she pulls her hair back and tries to style it like Julius. It’s not projecting transness on the character to say her connection to Julius is not just based in their shared queerness but in her gender envy of his masculine queer aesthetic.

And oh what an aesthetic that is! Jacob Elordi has never looked better and never been better. The camera looks at him with a gaze that is both Henry’s lust and Muriel’s envy. Julius is given a tender heartthrob portrayal more akin to the images of the decade the film takes place than what we usually see on-screen in our current era.

It’s not an insult to the movie itself to say it will have a second life on the internet once the talented young gays online get their fan edit fingers on it. The film is as unruly as queer discovery but its many moments are sublime. Elordi will be the focus, but Daisy Edgar-Jones, Diego Calva, Sasha Calle, and Kat Cunning will receive plenty of deserved love as well.

There is a polish to the film for a story that could maybe have used a bit more grit. But the commitment to sincerity and melodrama works because of the performers. The world of the film feels more pastiche of the 1950s than an actual window, and it works for this romantic fantasy.

Throughout the film, parallels are made between gambling and living an out queer life. At one point a character states this parallel outright. This is a film determined to show that in this gamble the rewards far outweigh the risks.

On Swift Horses leans toward the wholesome and hopeful. But that doesn’t mean a lack of complexity. This is a very queer film about very queer experiences. While the plotting is neat, the emotions remain wild.

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Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

“They might be stars on the court, but they’re still just kids.”

Former WNBA player and struggling high school basketball coach Heather Hobbs (Jessica Matten) says this line when trying to convince her mentor to come on as assistant coach. She’s emphasizing the fragility of her team in the wake of an immense loss, but their status as “just kids” is also what can make high school and college sports so enthralling. Because of their youth, these athletes are even more unpredictable. They lack the polish of pros, more impacted by circumstance, less consistent in their gameplay. It makes for great sporting events, and, even more so, it makes for a great sports movie.

Sydney Freeland’s Rez Ball is about a group of kids underestimated by everyone but themselves. Inspired by the book Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation, the film follows the Chuska Warriors, led by Coach Hobbs and team captain Jimmy Holiday (Kauchani Bratt), as they attempt to win a championship after losing their star player. While the film hits the expected genre beats, it also doesn’t soften the problems faced by teenagers — especially Indigenous teenagers living in the U.S. This is a basketball movie, but it’s a basketball movie that deals with suicide, alcoholism, and generational grief.

While, at first, the film is a tad easy in its exposition — we learn Coach Hobbs is breaking up with her girlfriend due to a brief text that appears on the screen — once the plot gets going, Freeland and co-writer Sterlin Harjo balance the tone and various characters. Its portrayal of grief experienced by youths may lack the sharp subtlety of Harjo’s Reservation Dogs (on which Freeland worked as a writer and director), but there’s simply going to be a different approach between an FX dramedy series and the tighter, more commercial format of a Netflix sports movie.

However, what this movie does share with that series is impeccable craft and exceptional casting. Since her debut Drunktown’s Finest, Freeland has built a stellar body of work. She directed beloved web series Her Story, the underrated feature Diedra and Laney Rob a Train, and a bunch of television including P-Valley and Echo. Freeland’s skill and experience are on full display here, especially during the basketball sequences. Whether the Warriors are winning or losing, Freeland makes us feel like we’re on the court. Creed III editor Jessica Baclesse and longtime Queen Sugar cinematographer Kira Kelly help create a visual language that combines action with poetry.

Beyond the film’s form, Freeland’s talent as a director is felt in the performances she gets from her cast. From seasoned performers to young newcomers, everyone in this film is excellent and excellent with each other. Chemistry goes beyond romance and the whole cast has chemistry whether that’s as mother/son, coach/player, or teammates. (Also Bratt and Zoey Reyes as Jimmy’s coworker/Navajo tutor/love interest Krista do have plenty of romantic chemistry.) Throughout the film, Jimmy has to learn that a player is only as good as their team, and that’s on full display in how these actors work with one another.

While I wish Coach Hobbs got a love interest beyond the specter of her ex, Jessica Matten does an excellent job embodying a competitive dyke nursing the wounds of her breakup by throwing herself into her career. She’s the heart of the film, alongside Bratt and Julia Jones as Jimmy’s mother, a character who could have merely occupied the archetype of bad mom, but due to Jones’ performance instead feels like a complicated woman haunted by reality.

Rez Ball reminds me of the sports movies I watched over and over again as a kid. Except none of those movies had a queer coach and featured a montage set to Lil Nas X. None of those movies had the craft of Sydney Freeland.

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Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

Five years ago — despite his protests — many called Pain and Glory a swan song for Pedro Almodóvar. It wasn’t an unfounded conclusion. After all, it was an autobiographical work about illness starring a long time collaborator that seemed to reflect on an entire life. Even if it wasn’t his last, many wonder what Almodóvar could do next. What does an artist do after that sort of career capping masterpiece?

So far, Almodóvar’s answer has been to play and to expand. He made two English language short films — an adaptation of a play he’d long-referenced and his sensual take on a western — and he made Parallel Mothers, his most political work in years. Having dealt with his personal demons, Almodóvar seemed ready to experiment and to confront the broader demons of past, present, and future.

Those modes combine in The Room Next Door, his first full-length film in English. Julianne Moore plays Ingrid Parker, a writer whose latest book confronts her fear of death. At a signing, one young reader asks her to write the inscription to her girlfriend with the note: It won’t happen again. Ingrid obliges and says, “I hope it doesn’t,” with the melancholy tone of someone who knows it will. Death arrives again for Ingrid when an old friend at the signing tells her that their mutual friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton), is in the hospital with cancer. Ingrid visits her and the two rekindle a close friendship that culminates in Martha requesting Ingrid’s presence when she takes her own life. The title refers to this request, Ingrid wanting no witnesses but someone nearby. The title is said multiple times, each time increasing in stylized intensity.

When a celebrated filmmaker makes their first film in English, people are quick to judge whether or not their style translates. Many will observe the heavy-handed script and decide it does not. This is a mistake. Almodóvar’s dialogue has always been stylized — American audiences are just quicker to accept this when a film is foreign. In fact, Almodóvar is in total control here both in moments that are grounded and moments that exaggerate for melodrama or comedy.

He has also found two English-speaking actresses wholly equipped to embody his words. Tilda Swinton — the star of Almodóvar’s short The Human Voice — was an obvious choice. But so was Julianne Moore, an actress whose best performances were with another gay auteur with a unique style. Both actresses are exceptional, balancing the various tones and portraying a deep intimacy with ease.

The film is explicitly in support of euthanasia. It’s also explicitly anti-cop, anti-fascist, and anti-neo liberal. Ingrid and Martha’s shared ex (John Turturro, also perfectly cast) is a climate scientist and in his doomsday speeches, Almodóvar’s own anger and frustrations can be felt. This is a film about a dying woman — it’s also a film about a dying world. How should someone spend their final days? How should the human race? What does hope look like when it’s not just a tool to evade the realities of mortality?

Like the writing, the formal style is also undoubtedly Almodóvar. New York has never looked like this. His signature colors and attention to design are on full display. And yet it doesn’t feel like a pastiche of old work. He seems inspired by this new setting, managing to mix the old with the new to achieve a stunning craft that’s both personal and fresh.

Before her illness, Martha worked as a war photographer. The Vietnam War and the Bosnian Genocide are mentioned, the War in Iraq is even shown in one of the film’s brief, sporadic flashbacks. This is the most unruly aspect of the film, but the reach is appreciated. How could a film about death and the consequences of human action leave out humankind’s most destructive impulse? This is a film brimming with questions and ideas, a desperate attempt to draw connections between the personal and the global.

By leaving his home country of Spain, Almodóvar has not just made a movie with famous English-speaking actors. He’s also challenged himself to expand beyond the world he knows. If Pain and Glory was a reckoning with self and Parallel Mothers a reckoning with Spain, The Room Next Door is a reckoning with the entire world.

There is so much suffering endured and witnessed by us all. But there’s also the sound of birds singing, passages of literature that remain like memories, late night movies with friends, and, of course, fucking. Almodóvar isn’t ready to give up on the world quite yet. For a movie about death, his latest is full of life.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

If I may begin my review of a French literary adaptation with some musings on brat summer.

Brat is an album about being a woman, about comparing oneself to other women, about mirroring other women and resenting other women and — whether sexual or not — desiring other women. At a time when out queer women are dominating the music industry, I feel like we now have permission to analyze the queerness of straight musicians anew. We can bypass our projections or speculations and focus instead on the gaze of their art.

Bi-vibes-but-not-bi Charli xcx is obsessed with women. Olivia Rodrigo is obsessed with women. Sabrina Carpenter is so obsessed with women her song about that obsession has a music video where she makes out with one of them. This isn’t a new perspective — see Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” for a decades-old example. Straight women have long given as much thought to their boyfriends’ exes as their boyfriends; analyzed the bodies, the eroticism, of women more than the men they fuck; formed closer bonds with female friends than male lovers.

In Françoise Sagan’s novel Bonjour Tristesse, the central relationship appears to be between teenage girl Cécile and her father Raymond. But through the lens of Durga Chew-Bose’s phenomenal new adaptation a deeper truth is revealed: the central relationship — romance even — is between Cécile and Anne.

Anne (Chloë Sevigny) is a woman spoken about before we meet her. Cécile (a star-making role for Lily McInerny) is on the French seaside for the summer with Raymond (Claes Bang) and his younger girlfriend Elsa (Nailia Harzoune). Their days are spent languishing by the water, reading literature, and eating delicious food. Raymond and Elsa have a sort of puppy love, an energy akin to Cécile’s with neighbor boy Cyril (Aliocha Schneider). Raymond casually mentions that he’s invited Anne, an old friend of his and Cécile’s late mother, to stay with them. Elsa immediately starts criticizing Anne. Her work as a fashion designer, her uptight nature, her lack of a smile. Then she questions this reaction. After all, she’s never even met Anne.

When Anne does finally show up, she does not disappoint. The casting of Chloë Sevigny is inspired, because she’s a stellar performer and because she brings with her a gravitas from decades of persona. There’s a moment when she eats an apple alongside Cécile and Elsa. As the other two chomp into their own fruit, Anne cuts hers with a paring knife, elegantly sliding the knife and apple slice into her mouth. Elsa watches Anne. Cécile watches Anne and Elsa watching Anne. We watch all three.

Despite updating it to near present day, Chew-Bose follows the plot beats of the novel to an almost exact amount. And yet within these beats, she’s invented rich scenes of subtle character development and grounded dialogue. The film recalls the work of Éric Rohmer, not just in its lush French aesthetic, but in the compelling nature of every conversation on-screen.

And so the plot does not really matter, nor the fact that the plot revolves around two men. While Raymond and Cyril are just as grounded and clear, the women themselves view them more as a vibrator or a pet store kitten. They are to provide pleasure, they are to be cuddled, and they are to be envied when in the arms of another woman. The connections themselves are secondary. They want these men, because other women want them, or because of what being desired by these men would say about them.

This is communicated through dialogue, but it is communicated even more through the film’s images and sounds. Chew-Bose does not rest on the ease of her scenery. There is a formal confidence, exciting from a first-time filmmaker, a deep understanding of cinema as a craft and all it can accomplish beyond the page.

In a movie where women and girls watch each other and themselves — one of whom is a fashion designer — the clothes and accessories and hair is given the utmost attention. Commented upon or just present is also their postures, how they walk, how they smile, how they fuck, and, yes, how they eat.

This film has a sumptuousness that some may mistake for vapidity. But the style of the characters and the style of the filmmaking is what tells the story. As many women know, often the substance is in the style.

I started this review with Charli xcx and now I’ll end it with Bob the Drag Queen. “I think I’ve landed on the hottest of my hot takes,” he said recently on comedian Caleb Hearon’s podcast. “Straight people don’t exist… I think that most straight women will acknowledge that women are sexy. They will acknowledge it and they might even lickety splits every once in a while. A couple of Coronas.”

Sans Coronas, how do straight women usually acknowledge this sexiness? Through jealousy, through envy, through admiration. Is this always sexual? I’m not sure. But it is always desire.

Before straight society became concerned about lesbianism, girls used to have crushes on girls and women and this was seen as normal. Maybe queer desire is a natural part of everyone’s coming-of-age. Maybe it’s how we figure out who we want to be.

Durga Chew-Bose’s take on Bonjour Tristesse is a rich film. There are individual lines of dialogue that hold essays within them. But, on a first viewing, I was most taken by this desire. Cécile is trying to choose between turning into Elsa or turning into Anne. The harshest truth of growing up is she can only be Cécile.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

An estranged queer person returns home due to an illness or a death. This is probably the most common gay film trope right after “doomed romance where one or both are straight married.” But Samuel Van Grisen’s Went Up the Hill approaches this narrative in a way we’ve never seen before — and not just because there’s a ghost.

Jack (Dacre Montgomery) barely remembers his mother, Elizabeth, who gave him up at a young age. But when he gets a call from his mother’s recent widow (Vicky Krieps) inviting him to the funeral, he travels to their remote New Zealand town to attend. Except once he arrives, the widow claims to not have invited him — to not even know he existed.

Jill allows Jack to stay out of what appears to be a sense of obligation — and curiosity. Then, on the first night they’re both in the house, the hauntings begin. Elizabeth starts to appear, desperate for something from both Jack and Jill before moving on in death. As our nursery rhyme pair navigates these encounters, they grow closer and begin to reveal exactly the kind of person Elizabeth was as a mother and a wife.

Immediately, expectations are subverted by the mother’s queerness. When Jack first arrives, it seems possible his estrangement is due to his queerness thanks to a confrontational aunt (Sarah Peirse who gives a standout performance in her short scenes). But Jill’s own queerness and knowledge of Elizabeth’s queerness shifts the usual dynamic.

As the film continues, Elizabeth begins to appear less Casper, more Conjuring. Her behavior in life was violent and her behavior in death continues this abuse. It’s rare to get a movie that honestly engages with an abusive queer person, and it’s especially sharp to see an instance where the person’s victims are also queer. Queer people often face abuse from one another, but in an attempt to push back on stereotypes, this has rarely been shown on-screen. It’s especially exciting to see it portrayed with nuance and formal risk-taking. There are moments in this film that are genuinely terrifying — the story oscillating between quiet drama and horror movie.

This is a humorless film. While there are moments of absurdity, everything is approached with total sincerity and a dour tone. At times, this can make the film exhausting. Once it’s revealed that the film is about abuse, this exhaustion feels pointed. But it still makes this a difficult watch.

The cinematography is gorgeous and the sound design and score are deeply effective. It’s the pacing — especially the drawn out ending and some unnecessary flashbacks — that weaken what is otherwise a fascinating work of queer art.

Still, I found myself excited by the film as a whole. Despite its imperfections, it’s portraying queer narratives we don’t often see and doing so with unique storytelling and a confident style.

When most movies about queer people reuniting with estranged family still hit the expected beats, it’s a relief to watch a movie where a young man is possessed by the horny ghost of his mother.

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