WATCH LIST: Outstanding Features From Gay Asian-American Directors and “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina"
In Theaters
Director Yen Tan's black and white drama, set during the AIDS crisis, stars Gotham’s Cory Michael Smith as Adrian, a gay Texan who, after leaving his Christian family’s home for New York City, returns several years later to share some difficult truths. Virginia Madsen, Michael Chiklis, and Aidan Langford play Adrian’s parents and younger brother in this superbly acted, emotional, and artful work. (October 26, Wolfe)
Gay director Patrick Wang (In the Family) presents a four-hour comedy-drama epic, presented as two back-to-back features, that takes its name from a fictitious 40-year-old arts center in upstate New York that finds its existence challenged when a hip new development called the FEEL Institute opens across town. Including dashes of David Lynch and Wes Anderson, it's a colorful, meta, and eccentric love letter to performance and art—with musical numbers! (October 26, Patrick Wang)
DVD/Blu-Ray/Video on Demand
In this Gothic horror modern-day fairy tale from an almost entirely female cast and crew, a shy teenager named Birdie (llirida Memedowski) is left at a convent by her grandmother to work out personal issues including an obsession with blood. There she’s haunted by a dead nun while finding flickers of romance with the groundskeeper’s daughter (Kitty Hall). (VOD, Syndicado)
Out actress Amandla Stenberg stars in this new X-Men-ish franchise adapted from Alexandra Bracken’s YA dystopian novel. Directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson and set in a world where 90% of the world’s children were killed by a plague, Stenberg’s Ruby heads up a clique of powered-up teens. (DVD, 20th Century Fox)
TV/Streaming
Greg Berlanti and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa bring us this Riverdale spinoff, which got scooped from The CW by Netflix, about a teenage witch named Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka), whose cousin Ambrose (Chance Perdomo) is "witty, puckish, and pansexual," according to Variety. (October 26, Netflix)
This new Brooklyn-set reality series follows a handful of locals as they strive for success in entertainment and business, including gay couple Randy Bowden, a model, and Marco Maldonado, a corporate event planner. (Tuesdays, BET)
Out actress Kate Moennig is back as Lena, right-hand-lesbian to Liev Schreiber’s titular Hollywood "fixer" in the New York-set Season 6. (October 28, Showtime)
Spinning dark children’s tales like "The Three Little Pigs" and "Hansel and Gretel" into a serialized modern-day horror-thriller drama series, gay writer-producer Kevin Williamson presents what he considers a mish-mash of his previous TV and film franchise hits, Scream, The Vampire Diaries, and Dawson’s Creek. (October 31, CBS All Access)
On Netflix in November
The outrageous, un-PC animated series Super Drags, featuring the voices of RuPaul’s Drag Race royalty Shangela, Trixie Mattel, and Ginger Minj, debuts November 9.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, a reboot of the 1980s cartoon series, gets an LGBTQ-inclusive reboot from queer executive producer Noelle Stevenson starting November 16.
And with Kevin Spacey’s career as dead as his bisexual onscreen alter-ego Frank Underwood, wife Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) now rules the White House in the sixth and final season of House of Cards, premiering November 2.
