Film
This Is What Love in Action Looks Like
A 2011 documentary about a Memphis teenager sent to a conversion therapy program and the community that rallied to protest it. Urgent, heartbreaking, and ultimately about ordinary people finding courage to stand up for someone they love. Essential viewing on institutional cruelty, teenage resilience, and what solidarity actually looks like.
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The Case Against 82014
Documents the legal battle to overturn California's same-sex marriage ban with clarity and emotional stakes. You see the strategy unfold, the prejudice laid bare, and real people fighting for their rights. It's a civics lesson that grips like drama.
But The outcome is known going in, which can deflate tension. Some legal arguments get technical enough to test your patience.
Pray the Gay Away2018
Follows a man who spent decades running conversion therapy programs before leaving the movement. His interviews with survivors and his own reckoning create a rare portrait of someone in the system genuinely confronting what they enabled.
But The former director's journey toward redemption may frustrate viewers who want less sympathy extended to architects of harm.
The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson2017
A fierce, beautifully made documentary about a trans activist and Stonewall legend. It combines archive footage, interviews, and investigative journalism into something that feels both personal and political, tender and angry.
But The unsolved nature of her death leaves the film unresolved in ways that some viewers find unsatisfying. It's not uplifting.
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The Tale2018
Both examine how institutions and authority figures exploit the young. Both feature people finding voice years later. But this one uses fiction technique to explore memory and denial—how we tell ourselves stories to survive.
Writer-director Jennifer Fox reconstructs a childhood encounter she reframed as consensual, coming to terms with what actually happened. It's a memoir and a thriller simultaneously—formally inventive, psychologically intricate, quietly devastating.
But It's experimental and nonlinear enough to challenge viewers. Some find the structure unnecessarily complicated; others feel it trivializes by aestheticizing abuse.
More like this (6)
American: The Bill Hicks Story2010
A documentary about a comedian who took on fundamentalist Christianity and hypocrisy with ferocious wit. It's about artistic integrity and refusing to compromise your vision, even when the culture despises you for it.
But It's primarily for people interested in stand-up and 90s counterculture. If Hicks doesn't move you, neither will this.
Boys State2020
Follows high school boys at a week-long mock government competition in Texas. It's a quietly brilliant look at how ideology gets transmitted, how kids negotiate belief, and where the next generation's politics lives.
But It's slow and observational rather than dramatic. Some viewers want their documentaries to have a clearer argument or villain.
The Act2019
A limited series about a woman who fabricates her daughter's illness for years, destroying her life in the process. It's a psychological thriller that happens to be true—tense, darkly absurd, and utterly human in its dysfunction.
But It's more psychological manipulation than external conflict, which some find exhausting. The mother is contemptible throughout, with no redemption arc.
Spotlight2015
Boston Globe journalists methodically uncover decades of Catholic Church abuse and cover-up. It's procedural filmmaking at its finest: watching smart people do careful work in service of a story that matters.
But It's deliberately understated. If you want passion and righteous anger, you'll find reserve instead. Some find it feels like a newspaper story transplanted to film.
An Open Secret2014
Investigates predatory behavior in the Hollywood system through interviews with survivors and industry figures. It's an unflinching look at how institutions protect abusers and silence victims.
But It's difficult to find legally and distributors have resisted it. The pacing is sometimes scattered, and it operates more as accusation than investigation.
Come as You Are2011
This Is What Love in Action uses dark institutional settings; Come As You Are uses comedy to claim sexual and personal autonomy in a world that denies it to the vulnerable. Both refuse the pity narrative.
A Belgian comedy about three disabled men on a road trip to a brothel in Amsterdam. It's genuinely funny, unsentimental, and treats its characters as full people with desires and complications and bad manners.
But The subject matter is provocative enough to make some uncomfortable. It's in French and Dutch; the translation flattens some jokes.
People
Directing
- Morgan Jon FoxDirector