The Criterion Collection is commemorating Pride Month in 2024 by adding two new titles to its canon: the Wachowskis’ pre-Matrix lesbian crime caper Bound and Querelle, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final feature before his death in 1982. I’ve seen Bound several times, but this was my first foray into Querelle’s throbbing maritime fantasy world. And because I came to it late, I couldn’t help but think about Barbie the whole time. The shiny gloss on Fassbinder’s cast of hunky sailors and sexy thieves… the bold, bright artificial production design… They were all so gloriously… plastic.

Greta Gerwig didn’t acknowledge the influence on her Letterboxd watchlist, but I’m choosing to believe that it was there, if only for my own amusement. That smooth artifice is where the two films diverge, however. Querelle’s plot revolves around two things—sodomy and larceny—and much of its dialogue does as well. Specifically, everyone in the port of Brest wants to know: Is it true that hyper-macho stud Querelle (Brad Davis) is a bottom? It’s a “Tom of Finland comic come to life, and has about the same level of raunch,” as Michael observes, a lurid, lusty example of the male-on-male gaze whose main character’s evolution revolves around embracing both the homosexuality and criminality lying dormant in his character. (Did I mention it’s based on a Jean Genet novel?)

Calling this a ‘queer film’ or ‘gay cinema’ is insufficient. It’s a film where, Chris writes, “nothing is more beautiful than a man who finds love in another man, and loves himself because of it.” It’s a film “informed and inhabited by decades of gay fetish imagery, where the cabaret singer’s songs are taken from Oscar Wilde, where knives are phalluses and phalluses are architecture, and where murder is the most erotic thing a man can do,” according to Liz. It’s a film where “men are cruel and doomed and desperately clumsy, and Fassbinder loves them all: the killers and the monsters and the thieves”—another poetic musing, this one from Sakana.

The names remain similar enough to give it a docudrama air—the director is still “Stanley,” while the producer has been modified from “Morris” to “Farris”—but the style of Strangers Kiss is harder to pin down. Matthew Chapman’s fictionalized retelling of the making of Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 film Killer’s Kiss is “directed like a 1950s melodrama in the best possible way,” Ian writes. But it also rejects the saturated colors and dramatic score of a Sirkian melodrama, favoring a more muted palette and quieter tonal shifts.

House didn’t make the jump from sought-after bootleg to Criterion release until 2010, and the selection of Nobuhiko Obayashi films available in North America is still small compared with his effervescent fireworks display of a filmography. Happily, that percentage will increase this month, with Criterion Channel’s Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi collection and Metrograph’s Nobuhiko Obayashi x 3 retrospective. Both series have some bangers (don’t miss Sada, Obayashi’s take on the story that inspired In the Realm of the Senses), and both share a title in Beijing Watermelon, which is also releasing this month on Blu-ray via Vinegar Syndrome.

Obayashi’s 1989 drama was recently restored in 4K by Shochiku Films, and makes its way stateside thanks to Kani Releasing, an independent label that’s been bringing some very fresh and interesting East Asian titles to North America over the past couple of years. (See: Shelf Life picks Richard Lester.

The frame teems with bodies and life, but the camera stays static, observing the action from an affectionate distance in a series of long takes. “This is one of the busiest films I have ever seen, but that [busyness] is solely made up of pure humanity,” Willa puts it. A meta breakdown towards the end of the film—“predicated on the Tiananmen Square protests, which occurred during filming,” according to Jeremy—gets a lot of praise from Letterboxd . But the shot that really charmed me is a simple wide view of the shop, framed as if the viewer were sitting behind the counter, watching a parade of characters by as rising and falling stacks of vegetables mark the age of time.

Revisiting it for the first time in a decade, one thing that struck me about Secretary is just how good it looked, which bodes well for the new Blu-ray from Australian label Imprint Films. It’s because the movie was shot on film, of course, coming as it does from 2002—the tail end of an era when the vibrant colors and sumptuous texture of celluloid came standard in motion pictures. (We had no idea how spoiled we were.) But the sets and costumes, with their lush patterns and voluptuous textures, were more pleasing than I ed as well.

That’s probably because what I did recall about this movie—to be perfectly frank about it—were the spanking scenes. A unique and thorny take on the rom-com, Secretary came out sixteen years before Piercing and 21 years before Sanctuary, the only other movies I can think of that are anything like it. It’s not going for a ‘realistic’ depiction of BDSM relationships (for that, we’ve got Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has ed), but trying to replicate the champagne wit and loopy plot contrivances of an old-fashioned screwball romance. Just, y’know, with a twist.

The success of a screwball comedy depends on the chemistry between its leads, and James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal are electric in this one. For the most part, Spader—who, as quite a few have noticed, was playing a kinky love interest a lot during this period—is the stoic dominant here, although he does get a few moments of physical comedy. Instead, Gyllenhaal is the one who sets the tone for the movie with her childlike vulnerability, which blossoms into an epiphany that gives her something to fight for for the first time in her life. It’s an empowerment narrative, one where empowerment is discovered through the voluntary relinquishing of power.

Secretary certainly seems to have short-circuited Letterboxd ’ brains: the dominant mode of reviews for this film is “horny”, with a significant subset of “horny for James Spader specifically.” (Quite a few say it’s better than Fifty Shades of Grey—filmmaking-wise, the comparison is insulting to Secretary, but the subject matter overlaps so we’ll let that one go.) But its sweetness comes through as well, as when Julia writes that “the positive message that this film has about healing and acceptance was really overwhelming”, and Josh swoons over “two damaged, neurotic weirdos [finding] their perfect complimentary, co-dependent match in one another’s perverse quirks and compulsions.” What more can any of us ask for in life?