Kokomo City

What makes Paris Is Burning such a landmark moment in the history of LGBTQ+ cinema? Such is the influence of Jennie Livingston’s 90s ball culture doc that it’s virtually impossible to watch Kokomo City without feeling its presence, but D Smith’s salty and vibrant film makes a big impression of its own by sharing many of its virtues.

The film opens with a pitch-perfect prologue, a sex worker called Liyah sharing an anecdote about a client, who turns out to be an Atlanta rapper of some renown, a misunderstanding involving a gun and a killer punch line – “We decided to fuck” – before the title credits roll to the strains of Randy Crawford’s Street Life and a series of street scenes shot in lustrous black and white. Like Livingston’s doc before it, one of Kokomo City’s biggest strengths lies in its casting, Smith keeping her focus tight by talking primarily to a group of four Black transgender sex workers living in Georgia and New York. They are a witty, charismatic bunch, and Smith channels their energy to create a crackling portrait where the quote-unquote ‘victims’ are having many of the last laughs. (Queens-based Daniella, in particular, wields her wit with sociological precision; her vibe is very “we out here fucking your menfolk”.)

Of course, this is only half the story and Smith and her cast are under no illusions that this is anything but “survival work”. Supporting these arguments is a cast of men who discuss the intermingled feelings of desire and shame prevalent in the Black cis male community that makes these people’s livelihoods possible, and also dangerous. One such interviewee is record industry producer Lø, who dishes quite openly and amusingly on his sexual preferences (in a nutshell: he likes women, including trans women; he just doesn’t like touching their dicks), and whose presence in the film calls to attention Smith’s own background: until recently she had been working as a producer for the likes of Lil Wayne, Ciara and André 3000, before she transitioned and her phone stopped ringing.

Halfway through the film, Koko, from Atlanta, speaks frankly about how many people in this line of work don’t make it out alive; with depressing poignancy, she was fatally shot after filming wrapped on the project. “For the girls that can’t speak, I wanna be the girl that speaks for them,” she says of her reasons for speaking so openly on her experiences, a touching moment in a film that deserves to do for trans rights what Paris Is Burning did for gay culture at the height of the Aids epidemic.

L’immensità 

Emanuele Crialese’s new film strikes a personal chord: it’s inspired by his experiences as a transgender child in 1970s Rome. 12-year-old Adriana (Luana Giuliani) – Andrea, as they prefer to be known – is struggling with acute gender dysphoria. They are fiercely protective of their mum (Penélope Cruz), a free-spirited Spanish expat who resists friends and family’s attempts to police Andrea’s imagination and, ultimately, their gender. But, this being Italy in the 70s, there is also a philandering dad (Vincenzo Amato) on the scene, all stony silences at dinnertime and sudden explosions of Catholic chauvinist rage. Beautifully made and shot through with feeling, L’Immensitá suffers a little from a focus that’s torn between Andrea and their mum, who is perhaps too saintly for her own good. Cruz has fun leaning into her inner domestic goddess – hardly a stretch at this point in her career, though it’s a thrill hearing her perform in Italian. She gets a couple of sweet song-and-dance routines with Giuliani, and there’s a great moment where Andrea, burning with rage after their mum is accosted on the street by a group of leering men, tells her to “stop being so beautiful”. It’s nice to see beauty acknowledged this way in film and, even at 47, Cruz’s is enough to give any kid a complex.

Afire

For years now, Christian Petzold has been flying under the radar as one of world cinema’s more understated talents, helping launch the careers of Nina Hoss, Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer, who stars in Afire, his tenth feature to date. It’s a curious addition to his oeuvre, a dark comedy about an insufferable writer, Leon (Thomas Schubert), on an artists’ retreat by the Baltic. There he meets a potential soulmate in Nadja (Beer), if only he could somehow learn to relax and leave his ego at the door. Meanwhile, a few miles down the road, wildfires begin to spread. Enigmatic in ways both provocative and frustrating, Afire perhaps works best as a minor-key riff on the thesis put forth by the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink: that the pursuit of creativity can turn you into a real asshole if you’re not careful – and stop you seeing the burning woods for the trees.

Scrapper

In Charlotte Regan’s quirky debut feature, 12-year-old Georgie (Lola Campbell) lives at home alone after the death of her mother, fobbing off social services with calls from a fake ‘uncle’ and fencing stolen bikes with her best mate, Ali. But when her absentee dad (Harris Dickinson) shows up one day for a spot of belated parenting, an odd-couple relationship ensues that brings the estranged family members together. There are charming moments along the way, and Dickinson is game in a broadly comic role that never really requires him to dig deep. But Regan overeggs it with stylistic flourishes that seem more suited to the music-video work she cut her teeth with, and some jarringly precocious dialogue for her young lead. The results feel too untethered from the real world to really get under your skin.

The Innocent

If the words ‘French caper comedy’ don’t have you running for the hills, there’s lots to enjoy about The Innocent, the new film from screen pinup-turned-auteur Louis Garrel. The Dreamers’ star’s fifth film as director sees him play Abel, a recently widowed man suspicious of his mum’s new boyfriend, Michel (Roschdy Zem), an ex-con she met in jail where she works as a drama teacher. Enlisting the help of his friend, Clémence (Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Noémie Merlant), he embarks on a cack-handed surveillance operation that Garrel mockingly directs in a Hitchcockian style. But when Michel gets wind of the pair’s antics, they are drawn into a criminal enterprise that puts them all at risk. Garrel’s film is soufflé-light and knowingly silly, but also charming thanks to some sympathetic performances and an unexpected, grandstanding scene during a heist when the distraction becomes the main event, emotions welling to the fore.