Avant-Drag! review – queer artists light up the streets of Athens with joy and resistance

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Drag is a tool of self-expression and of protest in this kaleidoscopic portrait of the city’s vibrant underground art The queer defiance of Fil Ieropoulos’s kaleidoscopic documentary manifests not only through its subject, but also through its form. Centring on a group of drag performers and gender-nonconforming artists in Athens, this shape-shifting film celebrates a vibrant underground scene that thrives in a homophobic system, rife with state-sanctioned discrimination and violence. Introduced through an episodic structure, figures from the community light up the screen with their artistry and activism as they carve out a safe haven of their own. In each of the vignettes, we get a glimpse of both the joy and the peril of navigating the city as a queer person. Decked out in extravagant costumes and makeup inspired by Leigh Bowery, Kangela Tromokratisch struts in towering high heels, while her drag performances, with their vaudevillian feel, parody heteronormative ideals of motherhoo...
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Pigeons! Superheroes! Farts! The best movie moments of 2023

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From angry confrontations to romantic reunions, Guardian writers pick the big-screen moments that have stayed with them the most

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is frequently enthralling over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, sinking into the depths of American shame as it follows William Hale (Robert De Niro) and his unofficial lieutenant Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) as they grasp for the money and land controlled by the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, which involves slowly poisoning Ernest’s wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) as they kill off members of her family and community. But just when it seems like the story’s final dominoes are tumbling over with inevitability, Scorsese jumps ahead for his final scene – maybe the most audacious in American movies this year. Rather than a series of solemn title cards explaining what happened to the people whose lives we’ve seen dramatized, the movie cuts to a true-crime radio show in the 1940s, with major figures from the film reduced to cartoonish voiceovers and sound effects. And then, to detail Mollie’s post-narrative life, Scorsese himself appears. It’s not a Hitchcockian wink of a cameo, but a show of respect, as he steps from behind the camera to essentially read Mollie’s obituary; the mood changes from playful to stark in an instant. Seeing this master film-maker visibly grapple with the limits of artistic expression took my breath away. Jesse Hassenger

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