Entertainment
Lino Brocka’s ‘Macho Dancer’ in 4K Revives a Queer Landmark
A softcore potboiler scandalous enough to prompt drastic censorship upon local release, with its uncut version only shown internationally, Lino Brocka’s “Macho Dancer” (1988) came out late in the Filipino director’s career, three years before his demise by car accident. Throughout the years, the film has remained largely underseen and has gained little attention from critics and distributors alike, compared to the three mid-1970s works readily attached to Brocka’s social realist cinema: “Weighed but Found Wanting” (1974), “Manila in the Claws of Light” (1975), and “Insiang” (1976).
For nearly three decades, the analog print of “Macho Dancer” sat at the Museum of Modern Art’s archives, while producers Viva Films kept the original 35mm negative, which served as the basis of the film’s recent 4K restoration, courtesy of Kani Releasing and Carlotta Films. Touring Europe since late 2025, the reconstituted copy is out in U.S. theaters starting July 10.
Though enthusiastically gay himself, the director rarely centered his films around homosexuality and homosexual characters. By this measure, “Macho Dancer” is an anomaly — Brocka’s most openly, defiantly queer film. So much so that “a mini-genre of imitations,” in late critic Tony Rayns’ words, emerged in its soapy afterglow, including the male stripper trilogy penned by Ricky Lee (who co-wrote “Macho Dancer”) and directed by Mel Chionglo, namely “Sibak: Midnight Dancers” (1994), “Burlesk King” (1999), and “Twilight Dancers” (2006).
Like his three major films, “Macho Dancer” is a direct result of Brocka’s discontent with his early commercial, and therefore Hollywoodian, works. “There’s too much fantasy in the movies, too much escapism,” he was often quoted as saying. “Philippine films are wanting in content; they need more realism.” Indeed, Brocka’s sense of realism is often regarded as the defining feature of the so-called Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema, a sensibility endorsed by the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, which, upon its inception in 1976 as then the only premier local critics group, formed the Gawad Urian film awards to recognize “cinema that deals with Philippine social realities over those which are merely skillfully or artfully made,” as founding member Bienvenido Lumbera put it.
Despite the focus on Brocka’s realist aesthetics, often in the context of the turmoil of the Marcosian regime under which he made many of his socially conscious and noirish melodramas, what crystallizes across his prolific filmography, most notably in “Macho Dancer,” is not the distinction between realism and escapism but rather their amalgamation, what scholar Manuel Ramos called “spectacular realism.” Such an amalgamation opens up to a different spectatorial experience, a notion of sensuality that’s rarely a concern of writing on Brocka’s cinema.
Within the spectacular, sweltering realism of “Macho Dancer,” what sticks to me is Brocka’s depiction of sex as a function of both intimate and material desires, and how it converses with the rest of his oeuvre.
The film centers around Pol (Alan Paule, in his screen debut), a young sexually fluid gigolo who takes his talents from the countryside to the seedy gay underbelly of 1980s Manila upon the reassignment of his longtime male GI patron. In one of the strip clubs, he comes across Noel (Daniel Fernando), a fellow provincial migrant and an expert hustler who shows him the ropes and whom he later helps rescue his missing sister Pining (Princess Punzalan) from being trafficked into sexual servitude. He also meets Dennis (William Lorenzo), later his striptease partner, who sells drugs to his clients and introduces him to the porn industry.
One could certainly find in the film’s storyline of rural-to-urban migration in search of a missing loved one an echo of “Manila in the Claws of Light,” Brocka’s most popular film in Western culture. As in that film, Pol and his fellow macho dancers’ foray into sex work is primarily due to socioeconomic motivations — the desire to pull themselves and their families out of abject precarity. But while Brocka offers a searing critique of the flesh trade as a violent infrastructure sustained by state corruption and neocolonialism, he also embraces a far more modern and textured take on sex work, hinting at the liberatory possibility of this line of work as being driven not by sheer desperation but by some sort of individual agency, though still hardly achieved without the former preceding it.
The headstrong Bambi (Jaclyn Jose), who later starts a romance with Pol, is a striking incarnation of this thematic complexity. Peddling her body since the age of 12, Bambi now lives and works on her own terms, naming her worth and selecting her clients without anyone bossing her around. But soon we learn that this sense of control is undeniably a response to the trauma and abuse she suffered from her father, her first-ever customer. She discloses this in a moment of naked vulnerability, after having sex with Pol, who urges her to come to the province with him. Near the film’s coda — in a stunning, sun-drenched scene by Manila Bay in which Brocka, smitten by Jose’s radiant beauty, resists the impulse to cut away — Bambi decides otherwise, flouting the idea of her being a damsel in distress.
For Bambi, sex is power, an invaluable tool she reasonably wields for self-preservation and physical safety. So too did the titular heroine in “Insiang,” the first Filipino movie to screen at Cannes, in which sex is likewise a central trope. But whereas “Macho Dancer,” at least in the case of Bambi, finds a more pragmatic purpose for sex, “Insiang” employs sex as a psychological weapon within the operations of a domestic drama.
In that film’s story, Insiang (Hilda Koronel) metes out revenge against Dado (Ruel Vernal), her hateful mother’s lover, who rapes her after rejecting his advances. She fulfills this through subterfuge, feigning affection for her perpetrator, channeling promiscuity, and manipulating the matriarch Tonya (Mona Lisa) to do her bidding — an infernal path from which she will never recover. “Insiang” demonstrates not just the height of Brocka’s feminist politics (which was clearly ahead of its time) but also the unsparing power of carnal desire and owning one’s sexuality. His cinema is as visceral as it is intellectual.
Elsewhere in his filmography, particularly in “Bona” (1980), Brocka uses sex and sex appeal to more sensuous effect. Played by Nora Aunor, Bona is a star-struck schoolgirl who trades her middle-class domestic life for a chance to play house with dimwit movie extra Gardo (Phillip Salvador), slaving away for him in the Manila slum.
The film’s sensuality arises in the ways that Brocka, rumors be damned, feeds off Salvador’s beauty and sex appeal, thereby posing Gardo as a symbol of desire — a beautiful but braggart babe with a strong build and smooth skin pictured in shifting states of undress. But the most damning indication of this sensuality is how Brocka, going by filmmaker Isabel Sandoval’s definition of Sensual Cinema, deliberately thwarts the sexual desire between Bona and Gardo. In the lone scene in which the characters have intercourse, Brocka merely suggests sex instead of totally simulating it.
“Macho Dancer,” for its part, gyrates between sensuality and carnality. The latter is mostly realized in the over-two-minute masturbation scene at D’Pogi, the gay club run by Mother (Joel Lamangan) and Pol’s first stop in Manila. In the scene, among those heavily censored by the Aquino administration, young men line up and collectively pleasure themselves in front of a mostly white homosexual crowd, underscoring the Philippines’ position (up to now) as a hot spot for exploitative sex tourism.
Sensuality, on the other hand, is at its peak in the homoerotic “shower” dances performed by the protagonists in Mama Charlie’s club, where Pol lands a job. In these rather lengthy scenes repeated three times in the movie and later mercilessly sanitized, a stripper duo, including Pol and Noel, tease their patrons by dancing and at the same time bathing each other on stage, the fantasy completed by the sparkling soap suds, the beaming disco lights, and the passionate music. It is in these prolonged lusty scenes that Brocka entertains and then frustrates the possibility of desire, queer or otherwise, between his male characters, who gyrate away what they cannot or are afraid to consummate. In this way, “Macho Dancer” becomes a film not just exhibitionist and spectacular, but also intimate and sensual.
“The characters of sensual cinema pine and swoon. They yearn to make love. They don’t get to do it,” wrote Sandoval. This assertion is especially true in the case of Noel. In despair after learning that her sister is being held hostage in a highly secured brothel, an intoxicated Noel risks his friendship with Pol and proceeds to kiss him, which doesn’t exactly unnerve the latter in a homophobic way, unlike the response of Julio (Bembol Roco) who punches his discreet gay friend Bobby (Jojo Abella) after doing the same gesture and quits sex work altogether in the excised sequence of “Manila.” Besides their one-time shower dance together and the illegal porno footage they shot, this stolen kiss is the closest Noel will ever get to fulfilling his unspoken desire for Pol, who in turn never seems totally indifferent to his friend’s affection.
Through such moments of tenderness and sexual comfort, the film courts not only material but also intimate, subterranean desire. Indeed, Brocka insists on escapist fantasies in a world that otherwise offers no escape, which, in my view, is more hopeful than bleak — and, in turn, allows this kind of gritty sensuality to persist in his ever-enduring, luminous cinema. The effect is quite intoxicating, an erotic fever dream wending onward as the queer auteur pleases. “Macho Dancer” is a masterstroke of Lino Brocka’s most sordid predilections.
“Macho Dancer” plays in U.S. theaters from Kani Releasing and Carlotta Films starting Friday, July 10.
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Kristin Hannah’s best-selling historical fiction book The Nightingale will be made into a movie after all.
The project was first sparked before the COVID-19 pandemic, which slowed momentum on the making of the film. Now the movie has a theatrical release date set and a growing cast attached to the story.
For everything we know about The Nightingale movie, read on.
When will The Nightingale movie come out?
TriStar first set February 12, 2027 as the release date for the film, but then the adaptation was pushed to March 19 so that it has Easter weekend (March 28) to capitalize on. In Feb., the film would have competed with Greta Gerwig’s Narnia film set to release that weekend as well.
Has The Nightingale started production?
Yes, Kristin Hannah posted at the end of March that the film had started production. Elle Fanning did press for Margo’s Got Money Troubles in April before the show’s premiere on Apple TV, but she had hinted as had her sister Dakota, that they would start shooting in a few weeks when Deadline spoke with them at SXSW Film Festival 2026.
Deadline also recently interviewed Lauren Neustadter, President of Film and Television at Reese Witherspoon’s Production Company Hello Sunshine while she was on set in Budapest, where the film is shooting
Who will be in The Nightingale movie?
Sisters Dakota and Elle Fanning, who have been attached to star and produce since the adaptation started gaining traction in 2019, will portray sisters Vianne and Isabelle.
Deadline exclusively reported that Edmund Donovan (Late Fame) landed a starring role alongside the sisters in January 2026. Details of his role are under wraps.
Next to join as first reported by Deadline are Mark Rylance (The BFG, Ready Player One) and Shira Haas (Unorthodox, Captain America: Brave New World).
Deadline broke the news of a quartet of castings that round out the film’s ensemble: Albrecht Schuch, Douglas Hodge, Gwilym Lee and Vinette Robinson.
What is Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale about?
The story centers sisters Vianne Mauriac and Isabelle Rossignol, who experience German-occupied France during World War II in their own ways. Vianne, the older sister, is more cautious while Isabelle boasts a rebellious spirit. The sisters split up during the war, “resisting in different ways” as Fanning put it when she did Deadline’s Take Ten interview series.
Who else is behind The Nightingale movie?
Michael Morris is directing the film. Dana Stevens (The Woman King) wrote the script for the film. Elizabeth Cantillon will produce for The Cantillon Company, alongside the Fannings and Brittany Kahan Ward for the Fanning sisters’ production company Lewellen Pictures, and Reese Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter for Hello Sunshine. The Nightingale was the Reese’s Book Club selection for March 2023. Nicole Brown and Shary Shirazi are overseeing for TriStar Pictures.
RELATED: Albrecht Schuch Joins TriStar Pic ‘The Nightingale’
TriStar first acquired the film rights in 2015 with Ann Peacock attached to write. Writer-director Michelle MacLaren and co-writer John Sayles were involved in a later iteration, with the Fannings initially boarding to star in a version helmed by Mélanie Laurent from Stevens’ script. At first, the film was set to hit theaters Christmas Day of 2020, and then it shifted a few more times landing on Dec. 22, 2022, but when the Covid pandemic kept delaying the making of the movie, Laurent stepped back to attend to other projects.
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The Emmys have always been a notoriously static awards body. When a show gets its laurels via a nomination early in its run, it’ll typically keep getting its laurels regardless of all but the most dramatic of quality dips. This tendency is part of why series like “Modern Family” kept winning major awards long past their most culturally relevant peaks, why the Best Comedy Series category has been dominated by the same three or four shows for the last five years, why there’s often no space for a series that grew into itself over time — see “Industry” — in favor of the ones that make a splash immediately. In the political field that is Emmy awards politicking, the easiest way to get a nomination or even a win is mostly to have already gotten a nomination before.
The 78th Primetime Emmy Awards and the Creative Arts Emmys, announced this Wednesday, aren’t a complete departure from this trend, but many categories have a remarkably fresher lineup than the past few iterations. Some great new shows like “Widow’s Bay” and “Pluribus” broke through and became some of the most nominated programs of the season. Old stalwarts like “The Bear” still showed up, but their nominations shrank notably in response to divisive recent installments. Still, many categories saw the same familiar faces show up, and there’s perhaps nowhere where that’s more apparent than the Animated Series lineup. The past few years have seen the category get a bit more interesting, with wins for shows like “Blue Eyed Samurai” and “Arcane.” This current year, though, feels like a regression, with a lineup that, bar one or two interesting choices, mostly feels like it could have been plucked straight out of 2015.
Of the six nominees in the category, zero are freshman series, and four are previous (at least) two-time winners. Most notably, the lineup includes “Bob’s Burgers” and “The Simpsons,” which have been nominated 15 and 35 times, respectively, and have each made the lineup since 2015. The classic Fox animated series definitely have received their flowers over their decades-long runs for a reason — they’re both among the best sitcoms of all time — but its difficult to call their current output the peak of their powers, or particularly central to the conversation of where animated television is right now. Their continued presence in the category, at this point, doesn’t register as reflective of their quality but rather voting inertia and a nomination body liable to box-check rather than seriously consider all the candidates. When a show is nominated every year for 10+ years, does the nomination even feel like an achievement?
Then there’s “South Park,” a five-time winner in the category, receiving its first nomination since 2021. The resurgence of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s long-running shock comedy and cultural satire is, at the very least, reflective of the actual show’s cultural footprint in the past year. After a few seasons that mostly made a splash within the show’s core devoted fanbase but failed to attract the attention or controversy the series used to in the days of, say, their 200th episode special getting censored and banned for depicting the Prophet Mohammad, the show’s 27th season went viral on social media for taking pot shots at the Trump administration; the premiere “Sermon on the Mount,” which was submitted for consideration, bites the hand that feeds it to directly criticize Paramount Skydance’s capitulations to MAGA and its cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” It’s likely the favorite to win from an Emmys body eager to make a statement, on the strength of its “speaking truth to power” bonafides.
Again, though: this is “South Park,” a show that’s most creatively inspired and culturally relevant days have largely passed it. Look past the catharsis of how directly it skewers Trump as an impish buffoon literally in bed with Satan, and “Sermon of the Mount” is a relatively limp, uninspired episode of TV that mostly sticks to the formula the series has followed for decades, with lazy gags and obvious criticisms that really only skim the surface of the current administration. As a nominee and as a potential winner, its recognition is more about what it represents as a way to piss of Trump rather than a creative achievement in and of itself.
Of all the repeat nominees, perhaps the most surprising and, frankly, unwelcome is “Rick & Morty,” nominated for the fifth time, its first since 2023, after winning twice. The darkly nihilistic sci-fi comedy series, which was once one of the buzziest series on TV, has in recent years largely faded into irrelevancy, never really recovering from the dismissal of co-creator — and former voice of both title characters — Justin Roiland after allegations of domestic abuse and sexual assault.
The series’ signature blasé outlook on its duo’s various misdeeds perhaps read a bit darker after those revelations, but it also didn’t help that the series almost immediately faced a fairly severe quality downturn, where the cast largely stagnated and the writing became broader and cheaper. The currently airing Season 9, which received a nomination for its season premiere, hasn’t really seen a notable uptick in quality or in buzz, making its return to the Emmys stage a little baffling. Perhaps voters saw the nomination pool as weak, but in the 37 series on the category’s ballot, there were plenty of more interesting options from Adult Swim alone. “The Elephant” was a wildly ambitious and one-of-a-kind experiment only animation could accomplish, while “Haha, You Clowns” was the funniest and sweetest animated comedy of the year.
The only first-time nominee in the pack — the category is rounded out by the great Disney+ anthology “Star Wars: Visions,” which received a nomination in the now-retired Outstanding Short Form Animated Program category in 2022 — is “Smiling Friends,” nominated for its third and unexpectedly final season. It’s a choice that I quite frankly am a little shocked the Emmys went with, because the show is so weird and out there that it doesn’t feel like the type of series to get much awards attention, but it probably helped that Season 3 was where the show seemed to evolve from cult hit to more mainstream phenomenon. I was never the biggest fan of the show, which had some edgelord tendencies I didn’t quite respond to well, but it’s a great nominee nonetheless — the submitted episode “Le Voyage Incroyable De Monsieur Grenouille” exemplifies the type of surrealist comedy the show does best, and it’s certainly a pick that feels representative of the year in animation.
But “Smiling Friends” doesn’t make an interesting field on its own, although it’d be a pleasant surprise if it won over “South Park,” and I suspect the race will come between the two. This was a strong year for animation, and the Emmys didn’t actually need to even look outside prior nominees to reflect that. Previous winner “Primal,” Genndy Tartakovsky’s experimental action horror series, returned for a weirder, even more gnarly third season that deserved some consideration, while the Hulu reboot of “King of the Hill” — a show that won twice during its long original run — successfully made an old show feel new. Instead, “King of the Hill” only managed a nomination for Pamela Adlon’s wonderful work as Bobby Hill in the voiceover category.
Then there are the first-nominees that could have been, like “Haha You Clowns,” which had a successful, fully formed first season worth recognizing. Amazon’s violent superhero epic “Invincible” has remained consistently strong and popular with audiences for four seasons, but has only received nominations for Steven Yeun’s vocal performance as the lead character. But the best animated series of the year was completely new, Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s Netflix dramedy “Long Story Short” a kaleidoscopic portrait of a Jewish family across decades that proved warm, original, and beautifully animated. The series admittedly never seemed to permeate or catch on with broader audiences — even if IndieWire named it the best new series of 2025 — but it’s the exact type of smart, well-drawn series the Emmys should be recognizing.
That’s not to say the shows nominated this year are bad. But except for maybe “Smiling Friends,” would anyone be particularly excited to see them win? Part of the appeal of a long-running animated sitcom like “The Simpsons” is the comfort it provides, how it can run for decades without changing too much from how you first encountered it. But these nominees suggest that Emmy voters should learn to let go of comfort every once and awhile, and try something new.
The Creative Arts Emmys will take place on September 5 and 6.
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Robert Richardson, our guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, recorded in front of an audience at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, is one of the most admired cinematographers in Hollywood history.
An artist and craftsman of the first order, Richardson is best known for his many collaborations with three similarly revered filmmakers: 12 with Oliver Stone, including 1986’s Platoon, 1987’s Wall Street, 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July and 1991’s JFK; seven with Martin Scorsese, including 1995’s Casino, 2004’s The Aviator and 2011’s Hugo; and five with Quentin Tarantino, including Kill Bill (2003’s Vol. 1 and 2004’s Vol. 2), 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, 2012’s Django Unchained, 2015’s The Hateful Eight and 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — in other words, every Tarantino film of the 21st century except for Death Proof, which Tarantino shot himself. Tarantino has said that in addition to his late film editor, Sally Menke, Richardson is “the greatest artistic collaborator of my life,” adding, “I have never had as much fun making movies as I have had since I started making them with [him].”
Over the 40 years since Richardson shot his first feature film, he has accumulated 10 Oscar nominations, three of which resulted in wins — for JFK, The Aviator and Hugo — a tally surpassed by no living person and equaled by only two other greats who are still with us, Vittorio Storaro and Emmanuel ‘Chivo’ Lubezki. He has also received 11 nominations for the top award of the American Society of Cinematographers, which, in 2019, bestowed upon him its lifetime achievement award.
Earlier this month, Richardson was celebrated at KVIFF in two ways: with the world premiere of Czech filmmaker Jana Hojdová’s long-gestating documentary feature about his life and career, Robert Richardson: The White Devil; and with the presentation of the fest’s highest honor, the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema, which had previously been awarded to the likes of Robert De Niro, Judi Dench, John Travolta, Helen Mirren, Michael Caine and Richardson’s longtime collaborator Stone.
Over the course of this episode, which was recorded right after the premiere of The White Devil, Richardson candidly discusses how lifelong hearing problems may have heightened his sight; how he broke into feature films and why, unlike most cinematographers, he has always preferred to operate his own camera; what it was like working with different kinds of cameras and film stocks on JFK, cranes on Casino, top-light on Kill Bill, digital and 3D on Hugo and ultra-wide on The Hateful Eight; why he agreed to cooperate with Hojdová’s documentary, and why he sees it as a cautionary tale; what to expect from his two upcoming 2026 films, David O. Russell’s Madden and Frankie Shaw’s 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank; plus more.
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