Contains spoilers including reference to ending.
Conclave, in addressing the Western culture war, comes down very firmly on the right side of history and serves as a reminder to dissenters that we’re on the naughty step.
Category: Film
Review of film: Emilia Pérez
On the one hand, there is your typical AGP bingo, our man Manitas always knew he was trans, he’d been suicidal about having to live a lie, etc and so on. I’d expected that. And like a lot of gangster movies, there is more sympathy for the violent quasi-psychopathic character than is really reasonable. I might have expected that too. Ultimately Manitas (even as Emilia) can’t bear that his wife goes off and creates her own life with a new man, taking the children with her. Again, no surprises there. And of course, Manitas as Emilia is at the centre of all the women’s lives, particularly Rita whose existence is very much as a simp – she exists just for him, her love unrequited.
Review of documentary: Will & Harper
Plodding with no illuminating moments. ‘Will Ferrell and his close friend, former head writer at SNL, Harper Steele embark on a cross-country road trip together
Review of film: Anhell69
The Chronic Youth Film Festival is curated by the Barbican Young Film Programmers, whose intake apparently changes on a yearly basis. I suppose that avoids anyone getting -gasp- old. The two young women who presented the screening looked as if they were early-twenties, so not that young. Not proper Village of the Damned anyway. A young man with a camera crouched nearby, snapping away, as they gave their introductory speech, stood stiffly together, no doubt having flashbacks to prefecture and assemblies.
Glen or Glenda? and the History of Trans Healthcare
I would have said it had Virginia Prince’s fingerprints all over of it, except the film predates Prince’s Transvestia magazine by several years. Nevertheless, Wood clearly spent time speaking to such men (probably Prince) and the psychiatrists who treated the same, as the description and depiction of transvestism is all too familiar to those who know it. A reminder also that gender identity ideology was already fully formed before most of us were even born.
Review of film: Desire Lines
Before we watched the film, Rosskam wanted to contextualise where things were right now for trans people, in the US there were ‘522 anti-trans bills’ and the UK had just banned puberty blockers for children. These were dangerous times. There was also ‘genocide’ in Gaza and we were watching governments ‘essentially decide who gets to be human and who gets to live’. Although the two issues may not seem related, they were, it was to do with the way governments ‘restricted bodies’.
The Lies They Tell 
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