A trans woman gets out of bed and pads across the room to the bathroom. She is naked. She goes to the bathroom. She brushes her teeth. It is a ritual I've performed so many times without a second thought, and now I'm watching it in a movie. I am struck by how commonplace this feels, how incredibly normal. I notice that her body isn't that different from mine. This is not a hyper-sexualized porn star; this is a regular transgender woman living a regular life. Our bodies are so often fetishized that it feels wholly transgressive to see a nude trans woman on screen simply existing - not being used as a sex object or an object of pity, just another woman going through motions that feel so mundane yet so familiar.

Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay was not yet 18 when her debut feature, So Vam, premiered in 2021. Now 20, Mackay has a staggering five feature films under her belt, a filmography that has quickly become one of most thrilling and radical bodies of work by a queer filmmaker in ages.

Based on the novella by William S. Burroughs, Luca Guadagnino's Queer exists in a hazy milieu of dingy gay bars and shady back alleys, hearkening back to a time when being gay wasn't just socially unacceptable but an actual crime.

It's difficult not to get personal writing about a film like Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers. I didn't really write about it when I first saw it back in December of last year. I managed a half-hearted piece for my top ten write-up (where it came in at number five), but it somehow felt too close, too raw, for me to fully grapple with.