It's almost incredible watching John Cameron Mitchell's scorching debut film, HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, today. How could something that still feels so prescient, transgressive, and forward-thinking be over 20 years old? Even by modern standards, this modern classic of queer cinema feels at once subversive and progressive, offering a bold vision of gender fluidity and identity that paints a much more complex portrait of masculinity and femininity than we are often given on Twitter. That's because Hedwig (Mitchell), the victim of a botched back-alley gender-reassignment surgery in East (undergone at the behest of an American GI who discovers that he can only marry young Hansel and take him back to America if he's a woman), is neither full transgender or cisgender. True, she undergoes gender-reassignment, but since she didn't really want it, can she truly be called trans? Or is she in reality a cisgender gay man? Hedwig is unclassifiable, and that's what makes her so emblematic of the core of human sexuality - it's impossible to put Hedwig in a box.

This is a film about discovering oneself in the margins of society's rigid gender definitions - a theme it hits on in its poignant centerpiece number,…

Lucia Puenzo's XXY is the kind of film defies pithy blurbs. It's impossible to categorize, because the film itself refuses to put easy answers to hard questions, and, much like its characters, refuses to be put in a nice, tidy box. It is the kind of filmmaking we yearn for but so seldom find - soulful and searching, exploring life in ways few people dare to imagine, asking questions that are often avoided, even in contemporary queer discourse. The film introduces us to Alex, an intersex teenager born with both male and female genitalia, who is dealing with the eternal pressures of growing up, grappling with their sexuality, and struggling with their own identity. Their parents have invited a respected surgeon to stay the weekend in hopes of getting Alex to have a gender reassignment operation to make them female. Yet Alex still has not quite figured out who they are, and in her state of confusion begins to lash out at the world.

They begin to form a bond with the surgeon's 16 year old son, Alvaro, who is dealing with issues of sexual identity of his own. This could have easily become an overwrought soap opera, filled with…

There is something sublimely magical in the way João Pedro Rodrigues' TO DIE LIKE A MAN gleefully contradicts itself. It is often simultaneously subtle and melodramatic, playful and serious, presentational and yet wholly real in the way it examines the life of an aging drag queen who is coming out as transgender while dealing with her long lost son who has suddenly reappeared in her life.

TO DIE LIKE A MAN is, in some ways, the best Almodovar film Pedro Almodovar never made. There is a glossy, camp element present of course. We are dealing with drag queens after all, but it's also disarmingly sincere. Tonia exists in a world of artifice, of distance between persona and identity. For most of her life she has been a larger than life projection of someone else, and it isn't she is actually starts to transition that she discovers who she truly is. For her entire life everyone has seen her femininity as a performance, but for her it's always been real. At its heart it's a celebration of humanity, a probing exploration of self-identity and image, of personal desires versus expectations.

Rodrigues uses long, fluid takes and vibrant color filters to create…

Movies, much like life, don't always turn out the way you planned. That much, and more, is true of Kimberly Reed's fascinating and surprising documentary, PRODIGAL SONS. What started out as a document of her adopted brother Marc McKerrow's quest to discover his roots, instead became a searing portrait of an unconventional family, where sibling rivalry, mental illness, and old wounds threaten to tear them all apart.

Kimberly is Marc's transgender younger sister who moved away from home and transitioned after she graduated high school. In the ensuing years, their youngest brother, Todd, would come out as gay, and Marc would deal with a brain problem that resulted in having to be partially lobotomized. While the procedure cured him of his seizures, it changed his personality forever, resulting in everything from general obnoxiousness to violent mood swings, as Marc continues to live in the past, a time where he was well liked, popular, and part of a seemingly idyllic family.

Years later, Kimberly, former Valedictorian and football player, is returning to the small Montana town where she grew up for the first time since her transition to attend her high school reunion, and also to try to repair her relationship…