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The Criterion Channel’s at its best when October rolls around, consistently engaging in the strongest horror line-ups of any streamer. 2024 will bring more than a few iterations of their spooky programming: “Horror F/X” highlights the best effects-based scares through the likes of Romero, Cronenberg, Lynch, Tobe Hooper, James Whale; “Witches” does what it says on the tin (and inside the tin is the underrated Italian anthology film featuring Clint Eastwood cuckolded by Batman); “Japanese Horror” runs the gamut of classics; a Stephen King series puts John Carpenter and The Lawnmower Man on equal playing ground; October’s Criterion Editions are Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Hunter, Häxan; a made-for-tv duo includes Carpenter’s underrated Someone’s Watching Me!; meanwhile, The Wailing and The Babadook stream alongside a collection of Cronenberg and Stephanie Rothman titles.

Otherwise, Winona Ryder and Raúl Juliá are given retrospectives, as are filmmakers Arthur J. Bressan Jr. and Lionel Rogosin.

If you looked to the 1980s for representation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on mainstream screens anywhere, you’d be staring into a void.

Hollywood, much like the reigning political administration of the time, ignored the crisis as it grew that decade — and certainly did not know what to do with it once ignorance was no longer an option. It wasn’t until Rock Hudson, once a glimmering fawned-upon pillar of quote-unquote masculinity, collapsed in the summer of 1985 and died that fall from AIDS complications that the film industry was finally forced to respond at all.

That same year, just a few months before Hudson’s death, porn-director-turned-activist filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan Jr. released the first narrative theatrical feature devoted to the gay plague that the likes of Reagan and Thatcher otherwise preferred to keep far away from legislation and policy.

Bressan died two years later from his own complications from AIDS,...

A restored version of Iván Zulueta’s ground-breaking 1979 film “Arrebato” (“Rapture”) is screening at the Lumière Festival’s International Classic Film Market (Mifc) in Lyon, France, thanks to Los Angeles distributor Altered Innocence and Madrid’s Mercury Films.

The cult film, considered a milestone in Spanish cinema from the post-Franco years, is seen as metaphor for how directors can be consumed by filmmaking. It centers on José, a frustrated low-budget horror movie director trying to complete a film while struggling with drug addiction. When he receives a package from past acquaintance Pedro — a Super-8 film reel and audiotape – José soon finds himself sucked back into the eccentric young man’s vampiric orbit.

“‘Arrebato’ has such a rich mix of horror influences, punk aesthetics, arthouse vibes, and queer cinema history that audiences can’t help being enraptured by this total gem of a film,” says Frank Jaffe, founder and head of Altered Innocence.

After decades of toiling in relative obscurity, Jenni Olson is finally receiving the industry recognition she deserves. Her collection of rare 35mm and 16mm queer film prints was acquired by Harvard’s Film Archive last summer. Her films “The Joy of Life” (2005) and “The Royal Road” (2015), which both premiered at Sundance, recently became available on the Criterion Channel alongside her many short films. She was a 2018 MacDowell fellow, and is in development on her third feature-length essay film, “The Quiet World,” which received funding from the Catapult Film Fund and Field of Vision.

Now, she’s the latest recipient of a special Teddy Award from the Berlinale, which recognizes a figure “whose work has made an exceptional contribution…to queer perspectives in art, culture and the media.” Past recipients include Tilda Swinton, Christine Vachon, John Hurt, and Udo Kier.

Anyone involved in queer film over the last three decades will know Olson.

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In honor of Pride Month, we put together a collection of documentaries that explore some of the many challenges faced by the LGBTQ community, and the ongoing fight for equality. From the Stonewall Uprising, to the oldest lesbian bar in the United States, the films listed shed a light on the lives of gays, lesbians, and trans people, while showing the evolution of the Gay Rights Movement. Below, find 10 documentary films that you can rent (or buy) on Amazon Prime Video. If you’re not already an Amazon Prime member, you can joint today for free (the membership will cost you $12.99 a month after a free 30-day trial). For more LGBTQ content check...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Albertina Carri's The Daughters of Fire is exclusively showing March 23 - April 21, 2020 in Mubi's Undiscovered series.Dating back to making shorts in the late 1990s, Albertina Carri has become a significant iconoclast in Argentine cinema in both realms of fiction and non-fiction films. Film and politics run in her blood and have long informed her confrontational and subversive sensibilities. As a queer woman, sex and gender amid homophobia, sexism, maschismo culture, and the male gaze also inform her work and career, which in addition to filmmaking also has her working within Argentine film culture as a major creative force behind Argentina’s Lgbtq film festival, Asterisco. Her most recent feature, The Daughters of Fire, is provocative in its explicit scenes among a group of queer women in which sex is presented in shockingly honest and upfront detail in fully pornographic splendor.