Nonfiction filmmaker Laura Poitras makes portraits. Photographer Nan Goldin makes panoramas. Together, in the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, they not only explore the intersections of politics, art, direct action, memory, and personal history, but also find a way to inform and add depth to one another’s artistic practices. Poitras finds the contemporary contours in Goldin’s activism rallying against the Sackler family; Goldin inverts and redirects Poitras’ focus on the photographer to the community of other queers, family members, artists, and iconoclasts that gave Goldin’s work a timeless potency. — Kyle Turner
Decision to Leave
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A classic queer conundrum: Are you into her or do you want to be her? We’ve all been there, including — I would argue — Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), the dashing and scrupulous detective at the heart of director Park Chan-wook’s spellbinding noir Decision to Leave. Meticulous in his method yet hedonistic in his desires, Hae-joon meets his match in the elegantly seductive Seo-rae (Tang Wei), who also happens to be the prime suspect of a recent murder. The film is immaculately made, and it’s Park’s attention to domestic sensuousness that transmits a robust sapphic texture in a film that, on its face, focuses on an ostensibly heterosexual attraction; who else but lesbians can make packing up takeout sushi read as pure sex? By no means as capital-Q queer as The Handmaiden, Park’s thrillingly carnal 2016 thriller, Decision to Leave, with its rich subtext, heavy glances, and nonstop yearning, finds an ironically neater home (for better or worse) in the contemporary sapphic film canon. — Wren Sanders
Inu-Oh
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