Dating Amber 🍭 // Pariah 📓 // God's Own Country 🐑
Happy Thursday! Today’s recommendations are three queer coming-of-age dramedies in celebration of Pride Month starting next week!
In movie news: Amazon is acquiring MGM Studios for $8.45 billion. Yes, billion. Of note, MGM produces the James Bond and Rocky/Creed films. Does that mean the new James Bond will stream on Prime Video in the future? A good bet.
Have a beautiful Memorial Day weekend!
Dating Amber 🍭
Eddie and Amber (Fionn O’Shea and Lola Petticrew) decide the only way to convince their classmates they’re not gay is to date each other. However, what begins as a plot turns into a beautiful friendship that helps them both come to terms with their identities. Here’s the trailer.
Why it’s great: Dating Amber subverts the expectations of both gay and lesbian coming-of-age dramedies by making this a platonic love story rather than a romantic one. So often is there “one great love” that is the energy a queer person needs to finally step out of the closet and into their own identity. What Dating Amber presupposes is that that person could come in the form of anyone.
Bitingly funny, especially Petticrew’s sassy Amber, and sweet without overindulging, Dating Amber feels like a watershed moment for queer teens. It’s a lens that they can truly see themselves and their experiences and realize that while it may take love to finally find yourself you might have to look in a place you didn’t expect. 92 mins.
Pariah 📓
Pariah follows Alike (Adepero Oduye), a Brooklyn teen girl and aspiring poet, as she explores different parts of her identity through lust, love, and heartbreak. Here’s the trailer.
Why it’s great: Here are some words from a beautifully written Letterboxd review from a Black queer woman — “There has never been another protagonist like Alike in the history of film (at least as far as I can tell), and that's because this is the very personal story of the writer/director Dee Rees.
To create a film like this, that's so deeply personal and heartbreaking, requires a lot of effort and thick skin. Rees has said in multiple interviews that the experience of creating this film was cathartic and that the relationship with her own parents still hasn't fully healed from their tumultuous past. She tells this story with a healthy infusion of heart and sympathy.” 86 mins.
God's Own Country 🐑
Johnny (The Crown’s Josh O'Connor) lives out his days working on his parents’ farm in his hometown, getting drunk at the local pub, and picking up men at the rodeo — though he won’t say he’s gay. That’s until he meets new Romanian farmhand Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu), who begins to help him open up to his feelings. Here’s the trailer.
Why it’s great: One part of the queer experience that many of us experience before coming is immense emotional repression and resistance to accepting an inherent part of our identity. God’s Own Country explores that feeling through incredible physicality and intimacy between Johnny and Gheorghe.
Comparisons to Brokeback Mountain are natural, I mean it’s two guy’s guys herding sheep on a mountainside, but unlike that film God’s Own Country is about the joy of opening up rather than the inability to. Surprisingly sweet and constantly engrossing, it is one of the great queer films of recent years. 105 mins.
One trailer to watch: Old
M. Night Shyamalan is back, which means one thing: twist ending! After a career-reviving run with The Visit, Split, and Glass (yes, it’s great!), Shyamalan returns with another high-concept supernatural thriller starring my beloved Vicky Krieps of Phantom Thread fame. It also stars Gael García Bernal, Eliza Scanlen (Sharp Objects), Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit), and Alex Wolff (Hereditary).
📽 P.S. You can see every movie I’ve ever recommended right here.
🍅 I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes! You can find new movie reviews here and here.