Dee Rees' Narrative Film Directorial Debut Pariah Vividly Realizes Coming-of-Age Queer Experiences

SPOILERS FOLLOW 

In my review for BlacKkKlansman last year, I mentioned how one virtue of the feature was how it was clearly made without any thought of placating or sugar-coating things for white viewers, it was about the stark reality of how racism permeates American society to this very day. A similar quality informs Dee Rees' 2011 feature Pariah, though in this case, it's a movie clearly made explicitly for and from a queer perspective. Pariah is a film exploring the turmoil that ensues when a family isn't accepting of their child's sexuality and benefits mightily from not wasting time to assure heterosexual viewers that "not all heterosexual people are like that" or similar platitudes. That's not what Pariah is here for. Its focus is bringing specifically queer experiences to a cinematic format of storytelling and it does that marvelously.

We Need To Talk About How Harrowing And Excellent Lynne Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin Is

How does one go in in the face of tragedy? When our conventional world is so shattered by unexpected events, it seems impossible to just keep on going with our normal lives. Tragedy has a way of just sticking around in our lives and there's no surefire way to cope with that. Over the years, we've had a large number of movies covering the process of trying to going on with our lives in the wake of tragedy, some of them rising to the level of greatness in their level of overall quality (for instance, Manchester By The Sea is one of the most realistic portraits of this process). But hands down, one of the best films covering this specific experience is Lynne Ramsey's 2011 motion picture We Need To Talk About Kevin. 

The Animals Are Running Mild In We Bought A Zoo

We Bought A Zoo. We Bought A Zoo. We. Bought. A. Zoo. A little over five years after its initial theatrical release, the title of this 2011 Cameron Crowe motion picture still feels like a goofy joke, to the point that the host of this year's Oscars, Jimmy Kimmel, devoted an entire segment of the ceremony to mocking the film as part of his fictitious long-standing feud with Matt Damon. Add in how Cameron Crowe's recent artistic endeavors haven't gone great (Aloha was one of the worst movies of 2015 and his Showtime drama from last year, Roadies, has already been forgotten) and it's not hard to see how We Bought A Zoo has become a punchline.