Following the lead of the Vito Russo book of the same name, documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman propose to trace the whole history of the depiction of homosexuality in American movie houses. The outcome is highly entertaining in the usual way of compilation films in the vein of That's Entertainment!, as well as enlightening and stimulating and amusing and other good things. The entertaining aspects, however, and also the enlightening, are somewhat spoiled as we get closer to the present day. As, to put it another way, we get farther from an historical overlook and deeper into an active agenda. Even the quality and the quantity of the clips seem to go down; and the lecturing and the preaching on the part of the on-screen commentators and off-screen narrator (Lily Tomlin) correspondingly seem to increase. Through that sort of thing, the documentary becomes as much a contemplation of the current Political Correctness as it is of its ostensible subject. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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