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Starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly, Bound is a story of Violet and Corky, a mobster’s girlfriend and an ex-con who fall in love. But, because Violet’s boyfriend is trigger-happy mobster Caesar, their love affair must be secret. When Violet comes up with a plan to steal $2 million from Caesar and frame the theft on one of Caesar’s mob partners, she needs Corky to help her pull it off. Things don’t go quite as planned, and Corky and Violet are forced to improvise in order to stay alive and stay together.
Beyond being an exceedingly entertaining, edge-of-your-seat thriller with all the violence any true lover of crime dramas could crave, what sets Bound truly apart from all the other films in its genre is the way The Wachowskis build the characters of Corky and Violet, the way they make them three-dimensional, much more than props or tropes to further the narrative. Looking back, one could see that Lana and Lilly Wachowski saw themselves in Corky and Violet; as two women trapped in a world in which they didn’t fit, busting to get out, to express themselves, to break barriers and defy the expectations put upon them. In exploring, building and bringing Corky and Violet to life, the Wachowskis were able to find a voice for their societal frustrations, using their artistic vision to bring characters to the screen that were contrary to what Hollywood generally permits there. The result is a film that features characters that are not only groundbreaking, but stand the test of time.
(Catherine Springer, Awardswatch)

In 1936, a Tokyo geisha named Sada Abe strangled her lover during sex, then carried a part of him with her for days afterward. Forty years later, Nagisa Oshima turned the case into In the Realm of the Senses, a film so committed to its subject that it dispensed with simulation altogether — and so controversial that its negatives were developed in France to sidestep Japanese obscenity law, its screenplay-with-stills was tried in court, and the finished film still cannot legally be shown uncut in its country of origin.

None of this would matter if the film weren't also a serious piece of cinema. Oshima — a key figure of the Japanese New Wave, no stranger to state censors after Night and Fog in Japan — uses Sada and Kichizo's affair to ask what happens when private desire is pushed past every social boundary meant to contain it. The couple's isolation grows more total by the scene; the outside world, with its uniforms and its wars, keeps intruding at the edges of the frame, a reminder of the discipline the lovers are refusing. Sex here isn't titillation so much as method: a way of dissolving the self, scene by scene, until nothing is left to negotiate with.

Programmed rarely, and almost never uncut. This is a chance to see, on a big screen, a film that spent decades defined by what it was accused of rather than what it actually does.

Unsimulated sexual content throughout. 18+. Recommended for audiences familiar with Oshima's work or arthouse/pink film traditions.

Premiering Off-Broadway in April 1968, Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking play The Boys in the Band was a hit with queer and straight theatregoers alike. Two years later it was adapted for the screen by Crowley, and upon the playwright’s insistence the William Friedkin directed movie featured the entire cast from the original stage production. Initially hailed by the queer community for its rare representation of gay men in mainstream culture, over the years as gay liberation gained momentum, The Boys in the Band became viewed by many as a potential hindrance to acceptance. It was feared that the characters portrayed a negative image of gay life that reinforced stereotypes; a shadow that loomed over the work for some decades. An unfair burden on any piece of entertainment or artwork featuring underrepresented groups that’s seen resistance or immediate backlash to the likes of Friedkin’s Cruising in 1980 and Russel T. Davies’ television series Queer as Folk in 1999. Although a mainstream film featuring more or less an entire cast of LGBTQ characters, such as The Boys in the Band, is still a relative rarity, thankfully representation and societal acceptance has shifted to a degree that allows further richness and complexity, and perceived negative traits in gay characters, without concerns that the entire community will be judged.

A hypnotic road movie taking us through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. As the first Swedish band ever to tour Central Asia, instrumental rock band VED bring their immersive, genre-defying sound to festivals, theatres and museums. Collaborating with local musicians, their journey involves listening as much as it does playing. Breathtaking landscapes and the rugged energy of former Soviet republics frame spontaneous musical encounters, unexpected friendships and absurd moments on the road. We’re given a poetic glimpse into an often overlooked region of the world where curiosity, improvisation and shared rhythms transcend language and borders.

There's a reason Martyrs still gets invoked as the benchmark whenever a new "extreme" horror film needs a point of comparison. Pascal Laugier's film doesn't stay in one genre long enough to be filed neatly: it begins as a story of childhood trauma and revenge, transforms into something closer to a home-invasion film, and finally arrives somewhere almost no horror film goes — an inquiry, conducted with clinical patience, into what happens to a human being at the absolute far edge of suffering.

That inquiry is the point, not an excuse. Laugier structures the film's violence as an experiment with its own internal logic: a group convinced that enough pain, applied with enough precision, might produce a glimpse of the transcendent — a martyr's vision, stripped of any religious comfort. Whether the film endorses that logic, exposes it, or simply refuses to look away from its consequences is exactly what makes Martyrs worth arguing about afterward. It's less interested in scaring you in the moment than in leaving you with something to sit with for days.

This isn't a film to program lightly, and it isn't one to watch passively — but it's a landmark of 2000s genre cinema, and one that rewards seeing on a big screen, in a room full of people who came prepared for it.

Extremely graphic violence and torture throughout, including prolonged scenes of physical and psychological abuse. 18+. Audience discretion strongly advised — this is one of the most intense films in the New French Extremity movement.

Fried Green Tomatoes is a story of "friendship". At least I'd have called it friendship when I first saw it. Set in Birmingham, Alabama, and switching between the 1930s and 1980s, the film follows Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates), a mousy housewife trying everything to save her marriage to a clueless Ed (Gailard Lee Sartain). On a visit to Ed's cantankerous aunt, who lives in a nursing home, Evelyn strikes up a conversation with Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy).

Ninny is a woman with a tale to tell: the story of Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson), Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker) and the Whistle Stop Café. Idgie and Ruth's tale is one of loss and love, but like... love love. Although I admit, at the time I thought, "Of course you raise your best friend and business partner's baby. That's what friends are for." Through learning about these forgotten women, Evelyn learns that, rather than chasing Ed's love, she should focus instead on loving herself. If it sounds a little trite, it's because it is, but oh my God did I watch the bejesus out of this film as a teenager. It just took years for me to figure out why. For some, and for me initially, the "friendship" between Idgie and Ruth could be just that. Nothing more, although also everything. An intense, symbiotic bond that was the most significant relationship of both of their lives. All friends swim in their slips at midnight, drinking and playing poker, and kissing suggestively on the cheek.

When I was watching Fried Green Tomatoes, my identity was subtext even to me. Film was a part of that awakening as much as any interaction or missed heartbeat. It's flawed. I'm not going to say it's not. But it was like visiting an old friend, an old version of me. A version of me that, when it came to the midnight poker/cheek-kissing scene, finally turned to me in rapturous, dumbfounded awe and went, "Oh... I get it now!"

(Rachel Walshe, filmireland.net)

Malmö's Culture Sound Zone will once again host local and international participants to explore themes of listening, citizenship, culture and urban development.

Over two jam-packed days as part of Malmö Gallerihelg, we'll hear from international guests, Malmö politicians, visual and sound artists, cultural organisations, and more. Through talks, workshops, sound walks, installations, performances, and conversations over tasty food from local providers, we'll build bridges and imagine shared futures in the Culture Sound Zone.

Below is the schedule at Hypnos. Full program here

09:30 Registration and coffee

10:00 Welcome to Sonic Citizens

10:30 Keynote Presentation: Prof. Kate Lacey (Professor of Media History and Theory, Sussex University, UK)

13:00 Panel: What's the future of the Culture Sound Zone? (in Swedish)

With Andreas Schönström (S) (Ordförande Tekniska nämnden), Stefana Hoti (MP) (Ordförande Stadsbyggnandsnämden), Iain Dace (NGBG Association), Yamanah Younis and Noah Harwari (Lyktan Arabic Culture Association), Pierre Durandh (Folkets Skafferi).

17:30 – 18:30 Nablus Palestinian Culture Association: A performance of Palestinian Dance, Fashion and Sounds

Some films tell a story. Daughters of the Dust holds a memory up to the light and lets you look at it from every angle. Julie Dash's 1991 feature — the first by an African American woman to receive wide theatrical distribution in the United States — is set on a single day in 1902, as the Peazant family gathers on the Sea Islands off South Carolina before some of them leave for the mainland. The Gullah Geechee community they belong to has preserved language, foodways, and spiritual practice largely unbroken since the transatlantic slave trade; the film treats that inheritance not as backdrop but as the actual subject.

Dash and cinematographer Arthur Jafa build the film around image and rhythm rather than conventional plot — indigo-stained hands, white dresses against black sand, a wedding and a departure happening almost simultaneously. The narration comes from the "Unborn Child," a device that lets the film hold past, present, and future in the same frame, more griot than narrator. It's a structure closer to quilting or oral history than to Hollywood continuity — deliberately, since Dash spent years unable to get the film funded through conventional channels precisely because it refused to explain itself in familiar terms.

Its influence is easy to trace and still growing: you can see it in Beyoncé's Lemonade, in Barry Jenkins, in a whole generation of filmmakers working in a visual language Dash had to invent from scratch. Restored and re-released decades later, it plays now as what it always was — a landmark, arriving late to the recognition it earned the first time.

NO TV EVENT sparked the summer heat quite like Behind the Candelabra, the HBO biopic about Liberace’s love affair with Scott Thorson, a man more than forty years his junior. (The film was reportedly rejected by the major studios for being “too gay.”) Much of the fanfare involved the casting of Michael Douglas (now 68) as Liberace and Matt Damon as his kept boy.

The movie opens in 1977. For anyone born after that date, as I was, the name Liberace conjures a bygone era of easy listening, Las Vegas, and a gaudy kind of gayness. The name is also something of a dirty word in gay culture because Liberace denied his sexuality right until the bitter end. The pianist died in February 1987, three weeks after being hospitalized in Rancho Mirage, California. His private physician listed his cause of death as congestive heart failure, and his staff went on to claim that he died from “the effects of a watermelon diet.” But the coroner’s office in Riverside County, in a rare move, rejected the death certificate, and—before Forest Lawn Cemetery could lay Liberace to rest—an autopsy determined that he died of cytomegalovirus pneumonia due to HIV.

The tabloids might not have pried open Liberace’s closet with such fervor had he not been so dishonest about his private life for decades. One year before his death, he published The Wonderful, Private World of Liberace (1986), which begins: “I wrote this book to show people who I really am.” Denial had long been Liberace’s default mode. “I have a general family audience appeal,” he once said, “and I don’t want to develop only a gay following.” In the film, Thorson returns one last time to Liberace’s deathbed in Palm Springs where, wigless and withering away, he tells Scott: “I don’t want to be remembered as some old queen.”

Behind the Candelabra is directed by the great Steven Soderbergh who, at 26, became the youngest director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes with Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). The script by Richard LaGravenese hits all the right notes, presenting the full paradox that was Liberace’s life. Here was a man who lived for the limelight but spent his entire life in the shadows; who relished pornography and multiple sexual partners but who never dared to come out to the general public. Behind the Candelabra captures these dichotomies and suggests further that the closet wasn’t such a terrible place for those privileged few who were insulated by wealth and celebrity. Milestones in gay cinema such as Gods and Monsters and Brokeback Mountain portray how the closet, prior to Stonewall, was a lonely, even fatal, space of repression and loss. What’s truly devious about Behind the Candelabra is its suggestion that the closet once offered actual advantages for the rich and famous. It may have been lonely at the top, but the luxuries were almost limitless—including the ability to maintain the lie behind the screen of a carefully managed public image.

(Colin Carman, glreview.org)

In 1961, a film version of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour was produced under the same title. Unlike its 1936 cinematic predecessor—which sidestepped the lesbian crux of the story to comply with restrictive Hollywood decency codes of the time—the recent version was faithful to the original Broadway drama’s storyline, that of two schoolteachers whose livelihood is ruined when a malicious student spreads gossip about their relationship being indecent. The twist happens when one of the pair, Martha, reveals that she does have romantic feelings for her colleague, Karen, who is happily engaged to a local doctor. From there, the twisted love-triangle becomes progressively more tragic for all three...

(Cinzi Lavin, glreview.org)

Director Stephen Frears’ film “Prick Up Your Ears” — that last word an anagram for “arse” — is getting a 30th anniversary re-release in a restored edition. The weeklong run provides a rare opportunity to see this biopic of the late gay playwright Joe Orton on the big screen.

The film was scripted by another gay playwright, Alan Bennett, based on John Lahr’s biography, which drew on Orton’s diaries. It opens with neighbors and police discovering the bodies of Orton (Gary Oldman) and his lover Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina), and ends, in 1967, with Halliwell murdering Orton before he commits suicide. The story in between toggles back and forth between Orton’s life and present-day scenes of Lahr (Wallace Shawn) interviewing Orton’s agent, Peggy Ramsay (Vanessa Redgrave), who has stolen Orton’s diaries from the crime scene.

As Peggy describes Orton upon first meeting him, she says he had “confidence and charm.” As Orton, Oldman delivers both qualities with notable élan. It is obvious why every man and woman in the film is attracted to him; he’s fetchingly sexy in his white T-shirt, leather jacket, jeans, and jaunty cap. That he sports a seductive, devilish grin when he is amused or is getting away with something naughty only adds to his appealing insouciance. “Prick Up Your Ears” captures very well the symbiotic relationship that develops between the lovers. Frears plays up the tensions between Joe and Kenneth throughout the film, as their arguments become increasingly nasty. Joe is harsh toward the insecure but supportive Kenneth, at times denying him glory and sex, which provokes Kenneth to angry outbursts. But Kenneth largely suffers Joe’s abuse — likely because he is terrified of losing him. That homosexuality remained illegal and very much underground in 1960s Britain may have contributed to Kenneth’s willingness to stay with a cruel companion rather than have none at all.

“Prick Up Your Ears” may shock less than viewers might expect given the gruesome facts of the story, but the film’s extraordinary writing, directing, and acting still hold up 30 years later.

(Gary M. Kramer, gaycitynews.com)

"Midnight Cowboy" moseys into UK cinemas again next month on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, and with it comes another opportunity to ask whether this is a film about homophobia or a homophobic film. In its portrayal of the friendship between two New York City street hustlers – the budding gigolo Joe Buck (Jon Voight), tall and sweet as an ice-cream sundae, and the stunted, snivelling chancer “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) – the picture hints at the inexpressible desires in any bromance. Ratso bandies the word “faggot” around and mocks Joe for the campness of his cowboy duds. Evidently the homophobe doth protest too much, for we have been privy to Ratso’s fantasies in which Joe runs shirtless with him along the beach.

It is the penultimate scene, when Joe robs, beats and perhaps even kills a gay client, that throws the movie into disarray. The scene itself provides a snapshot of Joe’s own shame and self-doubt, and a film should be allowed to depict the consequences of homophobia without being accused of perpetuating it. But it’s the way the attack on that man is swept blithely aside in the next scene that casts doubts on the motives of the film, and on the integrity of its gay British director, John Schlesinger. So why is it that I struggle to take offence?

What we look for in our formative years can be very different from the demands we make later as analytical adults, and it was certainly more important to me that representations of gayness were complex or colourful than that they were positive, whatever that meant. As far as I was concerned, film-makers were welcome to be hostile or mocking toward homosexuality just so long as they didn’t ignore it. I would have taken animosity over anonymity any day.

(Ryan Gilbey, theguardian.com)

A special Halloween event hosted by Death Cafe Malmö. The afternoon will begin with the screening of a film on the subject of death, followed by coffee/tea, cake and conversation on death. 

Doors open: 14.45 

Film begins: 15.00

Director Ebba Stoppelenburg on her documentary film Jolly (2026): 

“For generations, my family has had a human skull at home. In Jolly I journey through historical, ethical, spiritual and scientific perspectives to try to understand who this individual was and how to properly care for their remains.”

Death Cafe is a space where people come to share and listen to other people's thoughts on the subject of death over a slice of cake and a hot beverage. Subjects which can be touched upon are for example thoughts on burial ceremonies, personal anecdotes on death and religious or non-religious perspectives on death. Everybody is welcome to join! Conversations will be held in Swedish and in English. Please note that Death Cafe is a philosophical meeting place and not a professional health service.

Here is some more information on Death Cafe: https://deathcafe.com/what/