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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Streaming: the best biker movies

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The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols’s drama starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler and Tom Hardy, follows in the leather-clad slipstream of Easy Rider, Quadrophenia and more

At 41, there’s still time for my midlife crisis to take an unexpected turn, but as yet I must confess that I have never known the pleasure of riding a motorcycle. As a London cyclist I can’t exactly claim danger avoidance as a reason, and as a keen driver I’d love to feel the open road minus the sensation barriers of doors and a windscreen. Still, biking is one of those things that movies have rendered so untouchably cool that real life can only make it less so – and even on my best day I’m not going to resemble midcentury Marlon Brando in head-to-toe leather.

Nor Austin Butler and Tom Hardy, for that matter, though while Jeff Nichols’s very entertaining The Bikeriders, now on VOD, to some extent continues cinema’s love affair with handsome, squinting men astride their two-wheel steeds, it deromanticises the scene a bit. Set between the mid-60s and early 70s, it chronicles the evolution of a Chicago biker gang from a mindset of simple, stick-it-to-the-man rebellion to a more directionless, Vietnam-soured atmosphere of crime and violence – and the dogged efforts of Jodie Comer’s disillusioned biker wife to domesticate her tarmac-addicted man. Whatever macho wish-fulfilment The Bikeriders offers is laced with melancholy.

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