Arts

I found The Good Father (1986), starring Anthony Hopkins, filed under LGBT cinema, but is this a fair appraisal?

I found it not only on LoveFilm but at my local video shop, both times filed under lesbian and gay, but although there is a lesbian subplot to it, it is more about the breakdown of marriage and the effects most particularly on men in the 1980s.

Picking this out of the gay/lesbian section in the shop, and reading the blurb, for some reason I thought that the picture was going to show a love relationship between Anthony Hopkins and Jim Broadbent - yes, I know, quite a thought.

Instead this emotional and period Channel 4 piece shows men without women (and children) in a kind of post sexual revolution Britain.

Hopkins plays an angry anti-feminist, throwing Miriam Margoyles out of his car for wearing an All Men Are Rapists t-shirt, and it is this anger that leads him to help Jim Broadbent’s character fight for custody of his son, after he is separated from his lesbian wife.

**After over 40 years, Rubyfruit Jungle still shines.**

The story of Molly Bolt, an adopted kid from a dirt-poor family, who falls in love in sixth grade with her friend Leota, has a cheerful affair with her cousin Leroy, falls in love in high school with her best friend Carolyn, wins a scholarship to the University of Florida, runs away to New York City...

I had never thought I had much in common with anybody. I had no mother, no father, no roots, no biological similarities called sisters and brothers. And for a future I didn't want a split-level home with a station wagon, pastel refrigerator, and a houseful of blonde children evenly spaced through the years. I didn't want to walk into the pages of McCall's magazine and become the model housewife. I didn't even want a husband or any man for that matter. I wanted to go my own way. That's all I think I ever wanted, to go my own way and maybe find some love here and there. Love, but not the now and forever kind with chains around your vagina and a short circuit in your brain. I'd rather be alone.

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Of all the neglected masterpieces of cinema from the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Killing of Sister George has not lost any of its power, its venom and its shock.

And of all the great monsters of cinema, Beryl Reid's character must be considered among the worst. She’s sharp, she’s rude, she doesn’t give a monkeys and to top it all, she’s a domineering lesbian. The Killing of Sister George tore the screen apart in 1968, and it can still do the same today.