Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

A couple weeks from now, a variety of artists will perform at the 2025 All Things Go music festival just outside DC and at a concurrent festival in New York. This year’s lineup includes Doechii, Lucy Dacus, Joy Oladokun, Clairo, and Kesha. In recent years, the festival has been affectionately dubbed Gaychella and Lesbopalooza, monikers that incite enthusiasm in the communities they represent. But almost 30 years ago, another lineup of artists was called Lesbopalooza in a different tone. When critics and industry insiders and random men who didn’t attend called Lilith Fair that same name, they did so with derision as a way to further ostracize and belittle its collection of female artists.

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, Ally Pankiw’s new documentary about Lilith Fair, begins in the present. It shows us young people on TikTok discussing or discovering this moment in recent music history. Then it cuts to Olivia Rodrigo talking about the importance of Lilith Fair and the influence of those artists on her own work. At first, it seems the documentary is trying to appeal to Gen Z first and foremost, as if its primary goal is to teach young people rather than be for those who already care about Lilith Fair, including attendees. Luckily, this isn’t the case. Bookending the film in the present instead functions as a way to underline the influence of those three years of music tours. There would be no Lesbopalooza (positive) without Lesbopalooza (negative).

Using a mix of archival footage and contemporary interviews — as well as some spoken excerpts from Sarah McLachlan’s tour diary — the film creates a portrait of Lilith Fair and the culture it fought against. It illustrates the sexism of the 90s music industry and shows how McLachlan refused its boundaries. First, she invites Paula Cole to be her opening act despite the industry standard that two women can’t be on the same bill. When that’s a success, she begins to imagine something bigger.

As someone born in 1993, I did not attend Lilith Fair, but I’ve long romanticized it. This film feeds into that romance. From the opening night at The Gorge to Indigo Girls creating camaraderie among the acts to the surprise success that became undeniable, the archival footage — of performances, of fans gushing — allows those of us who weren’t there a little taste of the magic. It also shows the power of the shows beyond their lineups: the money raised for charities, the focus on having women crew, and even the insistence of giving all the crew healthcare.

It also displays the cost of this rebellion. Like the wonderful Indigo Girls documentary from a couple years ago, It’s Only Life After All, we’re shown how quickly Lilith Fair and its associated acts became an easy punchline. Both that documentary and this one reveal how the jokes weren’t a lighthearted jest but a more sinister reinforcement of sexism and homophobia.

One of my favorite parts of the documentary invites music journalist Ann Powers to respond to the complaint that it was women critics who were harshest, women critics who seemed to always be discovering “women musicians” anew. Powers notes that she was often writing the pieces her male colleagues and bosses assigned her. The sexism of the music industry didn’t just impact the artists — it was also experienced by the women writing about them.

By the end of Lilith Fair’s three years, the exhaustion of everyone involved — especially McLachlan — is deeply felt. It was a resounding success and yet the ambitious tours combined with the cultural backlash including bomb threats from anti-abortion groups made it taxing. The final conclusion is a hopeful one: these tours had a greater impact than McLachlan and her collaborators could ever have imagined at the time. It also leaves room for a different, less simplistic kind of hope. Like the angry young white men at Woodstock ‘99 and the media eager to tear women down, many of society’s worst impulses continue on. But anyone can take up the mantle of Lilith Fair, to refuse discriminating practices and push to make our world a little better. We can work together and view our successes as intertwined rather than in competition. We can gather and make a new world, even if it only lasts a few years, a summer, a night.

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery will be available to stream on Hulu and Disney+ starting September 21.

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Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

If Jodie Foster was your therapist, would you maintain doctor/patient boundaries? Or would you try your best to flirt? Would your partner seethe with jealousy whenever you spoke of her? Would you dream of a connection that transcended the couch, transcended time itself? Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life presents a sort of twisted wish fulfillment for lesbians everywhere: Jodie Foster is your therapist and she’s taken on your death as her personal cause.

Foster plays Dr. Lilian Steiner, an American psychiatrist whose life and practice have long been in Paris. When her patient of nine years (Virginie Efira) suddenly dies by suicide, she begins to suspect the true cause might be murder. Her time playing detective leads her to reconnect with her ex-husband, confront a fractured relationship with her son, aaaand to a hypnotist who suggests Lilian and her patient were lovers in a past life, Lilian impregnated her, and then the patient died tragically in Nazi-occupied France.

The last few years have brought a renaissance of sorts for Foster who secured an Oscar nomination for NYAD and an Emmy win for True Detective: Night Country. Her work here is even better. As a rational woman spiraling into the irrational, Foster is remarkable. She plays the film’s shifting tones perfectly adding humor and pathos often to the same moments. Even when the plot loses focus, Foster grounds the film reminding the viewer that the genre stylings and past life hijinks are cover for a simple human story.

The last time director and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski teamed up with an English speaking movie star, she gave Natalie Portman one of her few masterpieces with the underrated Planetarium. There’s a freedom and an intimacy to Zlotowski’s work that these stars would be hard-pressed to find in Hollywood. It opens something up in them bringing out their very best.

In general, Zlotowski’s work is often taken for granted. Other than her bombastic scores and soundtracks — Talking Heads’ “Psychokiller” is used particularly well here — Zlotowski approaches cinema with a gentle touch. There’s a lightness to her work, even when dealing with suicide and murder, its depth and devastation hidden in only a couple lines of dialogue or a single frame.

Her previous film, Other People’s Children, explored the connection between a woman and her boyfriend’s daughter. Here, she takes on another intimate relationship that’s hard to define: the one between a therapist and their patients. There’s a fascination with the way someone can know another person so well and yet not at all. Zlotowski seems to suggest this speaks to something beyond psychiatry: Can anyone really know the entirety of another?

Lillian’s mystery-solving ultimately does more to restore her former heteronormative bliss than to open up reincarnated queerness. But the lack of on-screen queerness is less important than one of our great living queer performers receiving a role with this much depth and opportunity. And how straight can a movie really be if it’s about the blurred boundaries of therapy with a gender-swapping time traveling romance?

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Drew Burnett Gregory

Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. Her writing can also be found at Letterboxd Journal, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Into, Refinery29, and them. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Instagram.

Drew has written 749 articles for us.

Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

Toward the end of Erupcja, Charli xcx recites poetry while looking into the camera. She’s sitting on the floor next to a stack of books, the shadow of a tear imprinted on her face. One of the books piled beside her is Miranda July’s All Fours, a spine recognizable to anyone who has, this past year, frequented the homes of queer women or vaguely queer women or straight women who enjoy fantasizing about the life they imagine exists within queerness.

Like the protagonist of July’s book, Charli xcx plays a character torn between convention and perceived freedom. Both women feel trapped in their heterosexual relationships with nice men, and both women use dishonesty as a tool of avoidance. Both women follow their impulses instead of sitting in the challenge of deliberate want.

When Bethany (Charli xcx) agrees to travel to Warsaw with live-in boyfriend Rob (Will Madden), the destruction is inevitable. She knows Rob plans to propose, and she knows Nel (Lena Góra), her friend/ex/person she’s most romanticized, lives in the city. Instead of telling Rob she doesn’t want to get married, she’s concocted a situation where she can run into her ex and blame whatever happens next on fate. Bethany and Nel are all about fate, interpreting the volcanos that erupt worldwide whenever they’re together as a metaphor for their passion.

Throughout the film, Bethany and Nel will be confronted with the limits of this perspective. An American artist named Claude (Jeremy O. Harris, providing the film some much needed humor) points out that volcanoes kill people. Rob will point out that volcanoes erupt weekly. Whatever unique connection Bethany and Nel imagine they share that allows them to blow up their lives and hurt their loved ones might not be as beautiful or special as they’ve pretended it to be.

There’s something interesting about this idea, about questioning the way chaos can be confused for romance. The problem with Erupcja is it’s trapped in a conventionality of its own. The bond between Bethany and Nel never actually feels that chaotic. Not only does their encounter remain unconsummated, but it feels totally devoid of eroticism. There’s no feeling of temptation. Bethany doesn’t seem to have sexual desire for Rob or Nel — her main attraction is to staying up late and not keeping dinner reservations. She wants the freedom represented by queerness more than queerness itself.

Nel is also in an on-again-off-again relationship with a girl named Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska). When Bethany gets to town, Nel ditches her as quickly as Bethany ditched Rob. The film makes it clear there’s a way for queerness to also be conventional. Lesbians can choose the nice, simple partner instead of the eruption as well. But what the film doesn’t make room for is a more controlled chaos. The options are not explosion or boredom. It’s possible to be honest with your partner about your desires and to find someone who shares your definition of consistency without being stifling. For all the talk of volcanoes and chaos, Bethany and Nel are kind of boring. The protagonist of All Fours is kind of boring. The problems they face are predictable and common, and there ends up being a tediousness to the whole affair.

Director Pete Ohs matches the characters with his style. Colorful monochrome scene breaks, a handheld camera, and a third-person narrator lend the film a feeling of experimentation. But six-plus decades since its French New Wave inspirations, these forms of “experimentation” are now as predictable as a girl wanting to leave her straight boyfriend for a woman.

Erupcja is short and inoffensive, and it might connect with people who share its characters’ conventions. But anyone who has seen Charli xcx on-stage knows her charisma could be used for so much more. She has a casual edge and unique eroticism that make this turn toward acting feel inevitable. There are glimpses here that suggest her presence will translate to the screen but they are fleeting. This is the kind of film that’s more concerned with giving a boring boyfriend his proper due than announcing the arrival of a movie star.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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When Joel Coen made a black and white adaptation of Macbeth and Ethan Coen made a sex-filled comic caper with his lesbian wife, audiences broke down the longtime duo like a math problem. Joel brings the arty seriousness; Ethan brings the silly comedy. But art is not an equation and genre is not a binary. Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen’s second collaboration Honey Don’t! is proof of that fact. They’ve crafted a film with an air of farce that ultimately finds more pain than humor in our outlandish world.

Honey Don’t! is about a private detective in central California named Honey O’Donnaughey (Margaret Qualley). She’s an old-fashioned private dick who prefers a rolodex and a landline to a computer. After a prospective client dies in a car crash, she begins to suspect that a local reverend (Chris Evans) is up to no good. Other threads include a gay man played by Billy Eichner who suspects his boyfriend is cheating, Honey’s teenage niece (Talia Ryder) in an abusive relationship, and a new romance Honey sparks up with a cop named M.G. (Aubrey Plaza).

In the tradition of California neo-noirs like The Long Goodbye, the plot mechanics here are secondary. Honey may think she’s trying to solve the mystery of the car crash and the church, but what she’s really trying to understand is the cruelty of human beings. Unlike other noir riffs like Inherent Vice, Cooke and Coen set this film in the present with explicit references to COVID and Trump. While it requires suspension of disbelief to reconcile the contemporary references with the retro aesthetics and genre conventions, it also gives the film an uncomfortable urgency. Even if Honey Don’t! exists in its own stylized world, it makes sure we’re never having too much fun to forget our own.

But the film does have its fun. Tricia Cooke promised us more lesbian sex, and she has delivered! It’s just that watching Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza use anal beads is less fun when one of them is a cop, something the film understands. Watching Chris Evans return to his Not Another Teen Movie comedy roots is fun too until the violence ordered by his character gets a little too real. Honey Don’t! is a seduction. The film itself is a femme fatale. It’s erotic and hilarious and seems ready to take us on an adventure. But just when the audience leans in for a kiss, it turns into something more sinister. It becomes difficult, thought-provoking, hard to like and just as easy to love.

At one point, the reverend tells Honey that she doesn’t like people. Throughout the movie this proves to be true. What’s to like amid all the cruelty, stupidity, and betrayal? But she does have one weakness: sex. There’s no intellectualizing when it comes to sex. There’s just desire. Someone doesn’t have to be perfect to turn you on.

You don’t have to like people to fuck them — the reverend makes this clear — but there’s something kind of pure about what the way sex prevents Honey from tipping completely into misanthropy. It’s as if there’s a biological force pushing her toward people (women) sometimes to her detriment.

There’s a clear throughline between the Coen Cinematic Universe’s most famous film Fargo and this latest work. There is more lesbian sex and no gold-hearted cop fantasy, but there’s the same melancholy frustration with human cruelty and senseless violence. However, where that film found easy answers in its good apple protagonist, Honey Don’t! lives in the complication. I know I said collaborations can’t be split in two, but let’s just say those complications feel pretty queer.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!

Drew Burnett Gregory

Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. Her writing can also be found at Letterboxd Journal, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Into, Refinery29, and them. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Instagram.

Drew has written 745 articles for us.