Join us in June as the Colonial celebrates Pride Month with the following films. We would also like to remind you that the Chester County Pride Fest is Saturday, June 20th, from 12-5 PM on Bridge Street. For additional details on that event, please see the LGBT Equality Alliance website here.
“They say you can’t cheat nature,” promises eternal youth…but at what cost? In this venomous Hollywood dark fantasy, director Robert Zemeckis turns a lifelong rivalry into a grotesque farce about beauty, decay, and the terror of aging. When Madeline (Meryl Streep) and Helen (Goldie Hawn) discover a potion that halts time but not death, their feud mutates into a macabre spectacle of fractured, reanimated bodies, with Ernest (Bruce Willis) left to maintain their impossible forms.
Thursday, June 4th.
Sponsored by Campbell-Ennis-Klotzbach Funeral Home. DETAILS
In a world of bubblegum colors and rigid binaries,But I’m a Cheerleader turns the machinery of repression into something both absurd and revealing. Director Jamie Babbit stages conversion therapy as a pastel nightmare, where Megan (Natasha Lyonne), an all-American cheerleader, is sent to be “corrected” through exaggerated performances of gender and desire. What unfolds is less a coming-of-age story than a dismantling of the systems that attempt to script identity itself, exposing their cruelty through stylization and camp. Buoyant yet barbed, this wickedly campy social satire endures as both a landmark of queer cinema and a defiant act of reclamation, transforming caricature into a weapon against the culture that produced it.
When a tornado rips through Kansas, Dorothy (Judy Garland) and her dog, Toto, are whisked away in their house to the magical land of Oz. They follow the Yellow Brick Road toward the Emerald City to meet the Wizard, and en route they meet a Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) that needs a brain, a Tin Man (Jack Haley) missing a heart, and a Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) who wants courage. The wizard asks the group to bring him the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) to earn his help.
Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s modern classic finds a point of convergence between melodrama and sincerity, where artifice becomes a vehicle for emotional truth. Following a devastating loss, Manuela (Cecilia Roth) journeys from Madrid to Barcelona, entering a constellation of performers, outcasts, and caregivers whose lives blur the boundary between lived experience and theatrical gesture. Drawing on the legacies of All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire, Almodóvar embraces coincidence, excess, and homage as expressive tools, crafting a cinema that wears its influences openly yet transforms them into something unmistakably his own. At once playful and deeply felt, All About My Mother becomes an ode to care, performance, and chosen family, where identity is shaped, shared, and sustained through acts of love.
You might know the modern wunderkind-cum-Oscar-winning director Sean Baker from his delightful The Florida Project or the Best Picture–winner Anora, but his roots are in microbudget indie filmmaking, and this 2015 breakout (made for a mere $100,000 and shot entirely on an iPhone) showcases his technical ingenuity, love of classical narrative propulsion, and rigorous empathy in spades. Unfolding over the course of a single Christmas Eve in Los Angeles, Tangerine adopts the picaresque momentum of a screwball odyssey, following trans sex worker Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) as she tears through the city in search of her unfaithful boyfriend and pimp, with her steadfast friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor), also a trans woman, in tow.
The Wachowskis (The Matrix) announce themselves with a debut that both honors and destabilizes the conventions of film noir, then in the midst of a ’90s neo-noir revival, rerouting its familiar architecture of betrayal and desire through a distinctly queer lens. When ex-con Corky (Gina Gershon) becomes entangled with Violet (Jennifer Tilly), the kept girlfriend of a volatile mobster, their scheme to steal from the syndicate unfolds as a tightly wound chamber piece of shifting power and calculated risk. Eschewing the fatalism that traditionally governs the genre, Bound instead locates its tension in questions of trust, control, and authorship: who holds the plan, who controls the narrative, and who ultimately gets to walk away.
One of the most beloved films of all time, this sizzling masterpiece by Billy Wilder set a new standard for Hollywood comedy. After witnessing a mob hit, Chicago musicians Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, in landmark performances) skip town by donning drag and joining an all-female band en route to Miami. The charm of the group’s singer, Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe, at the height of her bombshell powers), leads them ever further into extravagant lies, as Joe assumes the persona of a millionaire to woo her and Jerry’s female alter ego winds up engaged to a tycoon.
Sunday, June 14th.
Sponsored by The Stove Shop Fireplace Experts. DETAILS
Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag ball scene. Made over seven years, Paris Is Burning offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion “houses,” from fierce contests for trophies, to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia and transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women—including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza—Paris Is Burning brings it, celebrating the joy of movement, the force of eloquence, and the draw of community.
A glitter-streaked inversion of the road movie, Stephan Elliott’s beloved import from Down Under follows drag performers Tick (Hugo Weaving) and Adam (Guy Pearce) as they journey across the Australian outback for a gig, joined by Bernadette (Terence Stamp), a recently widowed trans woman whose poise and dry wit anchor the trio’s volatile dynamic. What unfolds is a picaresque chain of comic and confrontational encounters as their flamboyant self-presentation collides with small-town conservatism. Buoyed by its iconic, extravagantly theatrical costumes and a spirit of irreverent camp, Priscilla balances outrageous humor with a tender emotional core, reframing performance as both armor and revelation.
One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar Wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as a couple traveling through Argentina and locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy as they break up, make up, and fall apart again and again. Setting out to depict the dynamics of a queer relationship with empathy and complexity on the cusp of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong — when the country’s LGBT community suddenly faced an uncertain future — Wong crafts a feverish look at the life cycle of a love affair that’s by turns devastating and deliriously romantic.
The Doom Generation immediately undercuts the label, spiraling into a nihilistic road movie where identity, desire, and violence collapse into one another. The centerpiece of his “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,” this still-controversial provocation (and self-aware nod to Godard’s Band of Outsiders) follows a trio of disaffected youths marked even by their color-coded names — Amy Blue (Rose McGowan), Jordan White (James Duval), and Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech) — as a chance encounter sends them drifting through a hyper-stylized American wasteland.
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