The penultimate film in our Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema series is Joyland, Saim Sadiq’s tender, quietly radical portrait of family and the complicated ways we perform the roles society gives us.

Haider lives with his wife and extended family in Lahore, where everyone seems to have a carefully prescribed role, especially the men. When Haider secretly takes a job as a backup dancer for an erotic theater troupe, he meets Biba, a magnetic transgender performer, and the two begin a relationship that forces Haider to confront desires he has spent his life suppressing. Meanwhile, the women in his family are struggling under their own impossible expectations, creating a portrait of a household where everyone is searching for some kind of freedom.

With Joyland, Sadiq brings an extraordinary tenderness to a story about a family in contemporary Pakistan. Sensual without being sensationalistic and heartbreaking without ever losing its warmth, the film became the first Pakistani film selected for the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Queer Palm. At its heart, Joyland is about what happens when the life you’re expected to want collides with the life you secretly desire. We think it’s one of the best films of the 2020s, and a perfect fit for this series!

Our Spielberg Summer series concludes with some post-Thanksgiving screenings of War of the Worlds, his hauntingly realistic reinvention of a Sci Fi classic that transforms an alien invasion into a terrifying story of survival.

When colossal extraterrestrial machines suddenly emerge from beneath the Earth and begin annihilating entire cities, divorced dockworker Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is forced to protect his children as civilization collapses around them. As humanity struggles to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe, Ray’s desperate journey becomes a fight not to save the world, but simply to keep his family alive.

Released in the shadow of a newly changed America, War of the Worlds channels post-9/11 anxieties into some of the most intense and visceral spectacle of Spielberg’s career. Stripping away triumphalism in favor of fear, the film stands as one of his darkest works. It’s a reminder that even at his most pessimistic, Spielberg never loses sight of the human beings at the center of the story, making it the perfect film to conclude our 14 film retrospective of his work.