Popular reviews

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  Review by Lily M ★★★½ 10

  Aaahhhhh I dunno. This is effective, but something about it also didn't sit quite right with me. Maybe it's just that it's really meant more to get cis people up to speed, or maybe the world has made me too jaded and cynical, but I didn't come out of this feeling... better(?) about anything? Reassured, let's say. Nor galvanized in any meaningful way, either.

  It feels telling that the two most affecting moments of the film are the ones where Laverne Cox and Jen Richards start crying while talking about this stuff. I don't know how else you would do it, but on some level it just feels like this movie is mostly just a supercut of transphobic media annnd…

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  Review by Lizzy ★★★½ 18

  I have lived as a trans woman, as of the first of this month, for a full year. And I have been exhausted ever since then. I’ve been exhausted because I’ve been deadnamed, I’ve been misgendered, I’ve been stereotyped, I’ve been judged, I’ve been insulted. I’ve been the subject of aggression, micro and macro. But I’ve been exhausted because additionally, I know it’s not just me. Everyone like me, man and woman, between and nothing, and non-conforming, has been dissected. Told that they’re mentally ill, that they aren’t valid, that they’re monsters and that they’re predators and that they’re pretenders. When I think about it too much, sometimes I wonder why people hate us. Why people almost seem afraid of…

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  Review by anjy 🌻 ★★★★

  hollywood has let the trans community down. 

  i feel like some of the points in this documentary could have been explored further and not move onto the next so soon; it kind of jumped from point to point and i wanted to hear more about each film/show. i particularly wanted to know more about media that portray trans people well and accurately. i think it’s very effective in showing the arc of representation of trans people in film and tv, but the feeling of kind of, hope? at the end didn’t sit quite right with me. i know trans representation has come a long way, but there is still so much to be worked on. 

  i don’t know what the…

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  Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★★½ 1

  I would pay good coin to see the face of every transphobic boomer when they’re told that Bugs Bunny is a transfeminine icon.

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  Review by Charlie ★★★ 1

  An important doc that traces the history of trans rep on screen — good and bad — and speaks to trans people about how they reconcile and relate to those images. You can’t expect a 108 minute film to catch every single trans portrayal on screen but I left feeling a bit frustrated the only transmasc characters we saw and talked about were all played by cis women. Why interview Elliot Fletcher and not talk about his roles in the Fosters or Shameless? Why have so many trans men talk about how under represented we are in media, only to under represent us even further in the narratives you focus on???
  I want our legacy to be more than  Boys Don’t Cry, I’m so tired

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  Review by Ella Kemp ★★★★

  Really brilliant stuff – eye-opening, sensitive and so thorough. The interviewees are all *so* eloquent and thoughtful, calmly explaining how for hundreds of years, well, we've been doing it wrong. Should be required viewing!

  Edit: While I enjoyed this a lot, these pieces of writing by two trans critics, Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner, point to just how much the education I felt also does come from my own lack of knowledge, rather than the film painting any sort of full, comprehensive picture.

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  Review by lucas ★★★½ 1

  WELL.... i have complicated feelings about this, especially because lgbt cinema is like...my thing. my thoughts are a mess, so, in bullet point form:
  - i KNOW this is made for a cis audience, which i am not which... eternally frustrates me when watching things like this but you know i get it. but it does reinforce the fact that i never want to make queer art for a cishet audience (sorry, that's how i feel pose is!)
  - there is a lot of pain in this documentary which in some ways is right and necessary because obviously there's lots of pain in the trans experience, and in our portrayal onscreen but i just feel there are few moments of…

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  Review by sam ★★★★ 1

  when i see a transphobe i floor it

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  Review by Liz ★ 2

  This is very much the trans equivalent to the film adaptation of The Celluloid Closet -- it's shallow and scattershot, more focused on reinforcing an already established canon rather than elevating films from the past that could be empowering to people, had they not fallen into obscurity. Would something like The Queen even be so prominently featured here had it not been restored last year?

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  Review by <Todd> ★★★½ 1

  "I want to cry talking about this narrative because it's just horrible" -Laverne Cox,

  - 2020 Ranked: boxd.it/4zdAI

  I've never felt like a status I have no control over has made me a target in the media. It's nice and everyone deserves that, but unfortunately society makes it a privilege instead of a right, this film made me think about that a lot and made me want to seek out more trans-friendly media (suggestions are welcome). Disclosure does an excellent job of demonstrating how pervasive negative messages about trans people are in the media and what sort of impact that has psychologically.

  The film is an effective primer on representation in film with little depth beyond that. I think a…

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  Review by Eliza

  yet another film about trans folks made For Cis Liberals To Watch And Feel Bad (see also: girl, the danish girl, a fantastic woman, etc etc etc), i simply do not care

  how about a movie where trans people talk about characters that they read as implicitly trans; about narratives that actually reflect our experience. we focus so much on Representation and Visibility, as if simply having a trans Body (which is always what these arguments reduce people to: Bodies) on screen is sufficient

  to answer the question of how trans people should exist on screen, we’ve gotta ask how do trans people want to exist on screen, and simply showing how fucking obviously horrible the history of trans rep has been…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★½ 1

  Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen holds up some excellent examples and covers an abundance of acreage across it's one hundred minute runtime as it carries out a systematic assessment of Hollywood's characterisation of transgender people. Produced and directed by transgender filmmaker Sam Feder, it makes excellent use of a procession of interviews to analyse the detrimental impacts that their historical discriminatory representations within mainstream films and television have had on their community as well as their culture.

  Trans people have a complicated history, and the documentary has a noticeable tenderness for the way it grapples with its themes for the outsider and the wealth of material on display calls attention to some terrible misunderstanding and exploitation. There is comprehensive archival footage from a remarkable array of trans cinema from the silent era to the contemporary digital age, and it showcases an impressive visual chronology of transgender people in movies, as well as a valuable means to appreciate the transgender viewpoint.