Marking 2017 are 11 films that cover themes from a glorious celebration of same-sex union ("Call Me by Your Name") to the history of the worldwide movement against AIDS ("BPM (Beats per Minute)"), the insidious nature of anti-gay violence ("Beach Rats"), and the perils of contemporary poverty ("The Florida Project").
Then there were a deftly executed lesbian relationship comedy ("Beck's"), a docudrama on a 1973 tennis match ("Battle of the Sexes"), a fight for same-sex adoption rights ("Alabama Bound"), an unlikely artist ("Maudie"), the impact of domestic terrorism ("Oklahoma City"), and the stain of racially motivated immigration bias ("The Chinese Exclusion Act").
1. "Call Me by Your Name" Romantic Italian director Luca Guadagnino's delicious boy-meets-man romance explores the nuances of same-sex affection over a glorious Northern Italian summer in 1983. Skinny, 17-year-old, curly-haired imp Elio (Timoth�e Chalamet) falls for Oliver (Armie Hammer), an American graduate student spending the summer as a live-in archeological assistant to Elio's dad (Michael Stuhlbarg). American James Ivory ("Room with a View") joins forces with author Andr� Aciman to produce an R-rated version of Aciman's novel. The bond between Elio and Oliver is both physical and verbal, including a playful moment when Elio leaps on the back of a retreating Oliver as if the latter were a wild horse in need of taming.
2. "Tom of Finland" Dome Karukoski presents the story of a legend. The work of Touko Laaksonen (1920-91) became iconic among gay men into leather. This bio-pic concentrates on the pivotal moments and relationships that inspired Tom's hypermasculine drawings. His art would excite gay men worldwide, especially in pre-Stonewall America, where freedom would march hand-in-hand with a dissolution of anti-sexual Puritan codes.
3. "BPM" ("Beats Per Minute") Robin Campillo's powerful docudrama centered on the Paris chapter of ACT-UP features a star-crossed couple. Nathan (Arnaud Valois) is mesmerized and seduced by Sean (Argentina's charismatic Nahuel P�rez Biscayart), a young militant whose behavior intensifies just as his grip on life is challenged, by falling T-cell counts and screaming matches with others in the group.
4. "Beach Rats" opens on one of anti-hero Frankie's favorite haunts: the Coney Island branch of the New York subway, which leads to the famous South Brooklyn boardwalk and Ferris wheel. Director Eliza Hittman pumps up the volume on each scene change revealing Frankie's wanderlust and perpetual search for new highs and distractions. Slowly Frankie's dilemma becomes clear: his desire for men's bodies is no passing phase.
5. "The Florida Project" Sean Baker, whose 2015 "Tangerine" revealed LA's "down-low" culture of drugs and prostitution, takes us to a broken-down motel in Florida where Moonee (Brooklyn Prince) lives with her childlike mom, Halle (Valeria Cotto). Halle dares her daughter, her fellow tenants, and the caretaker (a terrific Willem Dafoe) to challenge her flouting all the rules of decency.
6. "Becks" Daniel Powell and Elizabeth Rohrbaugh give us the hard-luck story of singer-songwriter Becks (Lena Hall, a Tony winner for a Broadway's "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"). "Becks" opens with our heroine being shown the door by her New York girlfriend, who replaces her with a younger, better-stacked model. Returning to St. Louis and to her embittered mom (Christine Lahti), Becks earns her keep through pass-the-hat sets at a local bar.
7. "Battle of the Sexes" Flashback to Fall 1973, when aging tennis star Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), more skilled at hustling for cash and cameratime than at winning on the tennis courts, challenges top female stars half his age to showdown matches. Riggs takes on reigning women's champ Billie Jean King (Emma Stone). The stunt, catnip to TV sports, transpired at Houston's Astrodome before a live crowd of 30,000 and a TV audience of 90 million. Co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Feris ("Little Miss Sunshine") offer up an A-list ensemble that includes Andrea Riseborough as Marilyn Barnett, King's hairdresser and lover. She and Stone pull off the tricky feat of showing the strains and pleasures of a female couple outed on a world stage.
8. "Alabama Bound" Carolyn Sherer tackles the prickly subject of same-sex parenting and adoption in a state once considered the nation's most deeply red. The film presents lesbians and their children whose rights are put on hold while the state's white Christian oligarchy wages a rearguard battle against justice, led by right-wing state judge Roy Moore. Cari and her wife fight for joint custody of a son born with a deadly heart condition. Meanwhile African American mother Kinley has to fight her ex-hubby for custody despite evidence that his new wife has abused their young son. The filmmakers argue that the battle for the rights and humanity of Alabama's LGBTQ minority is an extension of the historic fight for equality of the races.
9. "Maudie" The primitive painter Maud Dowley Lewis was born in Nova Scotia to a blacksmith dad, Jack, and a folk-artist mom, Agnes. Crippled by childhood arthritis, Maud developed a gift for painting comparable to the American folk artist Grandma Moses. Maud suffered the devastating loss of both parents at 14, and was consigned to the home of a stern aunt. From there we watch as Maudie (Sally Hawkins) becomes a kind of maid to 40ish recluse Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke). The story of how this incompetent housekeeper and angry bachelor manage to coexist would be remarkable enough, but that Maudie wins him over to allowing her artistic pursuits is nothing less than astonishing.
10. "Oklahoma City" is a chilling and exhaustive account of convicted white terrorist Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. As the film opens, a title flashes, "April 19, 1995, 9:02 a.m." We hear voices at a meeting of the local Water Resource Board, then a gigantic explosion. The filmmakers provide historical footage showing damage to the building, with first-person interviews of survivors. Then we flashback to the early '80s in northern Idaho, where white supremacists are massing. This terrific PBS-funded film for "The American Experience" was also released in select theaters.
10 (2). Tied with "The Chinese Exclusion Act," in which Ric Burns and Ll-Shin Yu explain the tangled history of laws barring Chinese immigrants to this country.