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The Living End. 1992. USA. Written and directed by Gregg Araki. 92 min.
A landmark work of the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s, Araki’s third feature marked a visionary reinvention of the road movie, suffused with the ambient irony, despair, and anger left in the wake of the AIDS crisis. Destiny leads hustler Luke (Mike Dytri) to meet film critic Jon (Craig Gilmore), who, like Luke, is HIV-positive. A further twist of fate leads to Luke killing a homophobic cop, paving the way for an expressly nihilistic road trip-come-crime spree, transmuting the hopelessness of the LGBTQ+ community after years of dealing with ubiquitous bigotry, persecution, and the pathogenic horror of the AIDS epidemic into a lovers-on-the-run fever dream quite unlike any other.
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