In all the discussion about the need for more and better queer inclusion in mainstream Hollywood movies, we sometimes overlook the trailblazers who are already working in the system, bringing their queerness – and the perspective that comes with it – into the mix even when the story isn’t queer at all.

Take, for example, Laura Terruso, a queer director who, only eight years out from film school, already has three feature-length releases under her belt, and whose fourth – “About My Father,” starring popular comedian Sebastian Maniscalco and screen icon Robert DeNiro – opens on May 26. In it, Maniscalco plays the son of a Sicilian immigrant hairdresser (DeNiro, of course) who reluctantly agrees when his fiancée (Leslie Bibb) convinces him to bring his very working-class father to a weekend getaway with her very wealthy eccentric family at their lavish summer estate. Needless to say, it’s a culture clash waiting to happen; but when it does, the complications that ensue are mostly comedic. You can’t get much more mainstream than that.

That’s not a bad thing. “About My Father” is a refreshing, feel-good comedy with a uniformly excellent ensemble cast that seems to be having the time of their lives. And while it gets a lot of mileage out of the contrast between his obstinately independent working class dad and the amusingly tone deaf attitudes of his goofily eccentric in-laws-to-be, it remains good-natured enough to show us the flawed, funny, perfectly relatable human beings behind the stereotypes on both sides of the equation (even Kim Cattrall’s staunchly conservative matriarch) even as we laugh at them.

Indeed, it feels more than a little nostalgic, and — as the Blade found out when we sat down to talk to Terruso about being a queer female director at the helm of a mainstream Hollywood feature — that’s not an accident.

Our conversation is below.

BLADE: Your movie feels like a screwball comedy from the Golden Age. Was that deliberate?

LAURA TERRUSO: I’m so glad you picked up on that. That was a huge part of my vision for the film. The work of Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder — those are some of my favorite movies, and I really tried to incorporate the themes, even some of the visuals. I particularly love Depression-era comedies, and I really look to them a lot for inspiration, because I feel like the time we live in right now is not dissimilar from that time, in terms of what’s going on.

BLADE: Part of the similarity also has to do with the way you poke fun at the characters – especially the one-percenters – without being mean-spirited or angry.

TERRUSO: That’s something that’s very important to me. I want to make kind comedies. I feel like nothing dates a comedy more than unkindness. The humor should come from the characters, and the situations, not from insults or ridicule – that stuff is just so tired, you know? – and I wanted this to be a film that everyone could love, that everyone could see themselves in and enjoy. 

BLADE: Do you think that’s because you’re coming at it from a queer perspective? Even though the movie isn’t a “queer” movie, it’s certainly relatable for queer audiences with its story about trying to fit in a world where you don’t belong. And there are a few nods to the queer audience, too, like a certain celebrity cameo we won’t give away, and that flash-mob wedding proposal near the top of the film.

TERRUSO: Yes! And it was important to me to find real queer actors and dancers for that scene – which we did. [Laughing] In Mobile, Alabama, of all places. But definitely, as a queer filmmaker, I feel like I’m bringing my perspective to the work. Even if it’s not themed in that way, I approach everything I do with that worldview in mind.

BLADE: That begs the question: as someone who is on the “inside” of the system, how do you think mainstream Hollywood is doing when it comes to queer inclusion?

TERRUSO: There’s a lot of work to be done, but I think it all presents opportunity for us to tell our stories – because they haven’t been told yet.

For instance, for my last film, a big studio movie called “Work It,” there was a little bit of a battle with the original studio attached to the project, because they didn’t want Keiynan Lonsdale to play an antagonist – they were like, ‘Oh, he should be the best friend!’ Fortunately, Netflix came in and took over that production, and let us cast Keiynan the way we wanted. It worked beautifully, and people loved it – and, of course Keiynan l both loved it.

BLADE: It’s ironic that there’s an over-cautiousness now after all those years of villainizing us on the screen.

TERRUSO: There’s this beautiful book called “In the Dream House” by Carmen Maria Machado, a queer author, and there’s a section where she talks about the trope of “queer villainy,” and how incredibly important it is because it’s a part of our humanity – if we’re only ever playing ‘the best friend’ or one of those other “safe” tropes, it’s not really a full portrait of who we are. 

That’s why I think it’s important for queer people to work in the mainstream, because those kinds of conversations, left in the hands of people not in the community, would always be going the way of the “best friend”. We want more nuance in our movies, and we can only do it by infiltrating the system in this way.

BLADE: What do you think is the most important thing that Hollywood needs to work on when it comes to telling our stories on the screen?

TERRUSO: I think the question that studio heads need to ask themselves when making a decision like that is, “Who’s telling the story?” If you have a queer director and a queer actor and they are saying “this is what we want,” trust them. If not, then maybe you can question it, but looking at who is telling the story and the point of view of the artists is so important to the nuance of this conversation.

BLADE: One last question: Was it great working with DeNiro?

TERRUSO: He’s an absolute legend for a reason, incredible to work with. And he saw that I had a real personal relationship to the material – which Sebastian co-wrote with his writing partner, Austin Earle – because my mother and Sebastian’s father are both Sicilian immigrants, who came to this country around the same time. When I read the script, I was like, “I have to direct this film!”

I find that sometimes the beauty of comedy is that you can heal wounds – you can make right things that maybe in life were left unresolved. My mom and I have had our challenges – when I came out, it was tough, I mean, she’s a Sicilian mom – but she’s so supportive now, and I feel so fortunate I was able to write a love letter to her with this film.

Besides, now I’ve introduced her to Robert DeNiro, which is basically like introducing a gay person to Beyonce, so I win. I’m a Black Sheep no more!

To read Greek writer/director Christos Massalas’s comments in the “official” notes included within the press material for his debut feature film – “Broadway,” which opened a limited theatrical run on April 26 and drops on DVD and VOD platforms May 16 – is to wonder what kind of abstract, experimental, hallucinatory vision he must have been following as he crafted it.

Describing the gestation process for his movie as he experienced it within his own mind, Massalas says that “The colors were saturated, and the feelings were sometimes red, sometimes blue, and sometimes they smelled of gasoline. There were dancers, there were thieves, and Athens was a sunlit stage where monuments of the 20th century stood glorious and rusty.” All that sounds very raw and haphazard, and perhaps more than a little pretentious, like a fledgling author’s ambitious-but-unfocused vision for the “Great American Novel” (or, in this case, the “Great Greek Novel”) they are passionately planning to write.

Yet incredibly, it’s a description that captures to perfection the essence of the film he crafted from that vision, and perhaps even conveys more useful information about it than any plot synopsis might ever be able to do.

Nevertheless, simply as a matter of form, we’ll venture to offer one. “Broadway” is the story of a band of performers, pickpockets, and small-time thieves who form a little family of outcasts living in an abandoned entertainment complex – the “Broadway” of the title – while putting on shows in the streets and stealing unbeknownst from the audiences who gather to watch them. It’s told from the perspective of Nelly (Elsa Lekakou), a strip club dancer on the run from her wealthy and controlling family who is drawn into the group by its charismatic mastermind, Markos (Stathis Apostolou), and finds a heaven from her “pitbull” of a stepfather and the gang of thugs he employs to keep her in check.

Nelly, however, is no naïve victim in need of rescue – though she claims to be accustomed to playing that role – but a resourceful and headstrong young woman more than capable of surviving by her own wits in the mean streets of an economically-ravaged Athens. Her talents as a performer quickly make her invaluable to the ragtag cadre under her new Markos’ autocratic reign, and though she assumes and accepts the special status afforded to her as lover and muse to her new protector, she also wins the loyalty and affection of her new cohorts as easily and completely as she gains the trust of Lola, the allegedly vicious and rabid monkey they keep locked in a cage as a sort of unofficial and unappreciated mascot.

Lola is not the only confined member of the Broadway clan, however; a mysterious, badly beaten fugitive named Jonas (Foivos Papadopoulos) is being kept in a storage room, locked away as he recovers from his injuries and hides from the powerful underworld kingpin who wants him dead. As he returns to health, his presence becomes a dangerous liability – until Nelly hits upon an idea to keep him hidden in plain sight by turning him into Barbara, her partner in a two-woman dance act and the newest member of their troupe.

From there, “Broadway” launches into an ambitiously sweeping narrative that feels like equal parts film noir and Charles Dickens as it takes us into a colorful and morally ambiguous underworld, created by economic disparity and filled with shadowy figures and secret alliances, then bursting improbably forth into a gender-bending musical before finally moving into Hitchcock territory for a thrilling third act “caper” scenario made even more suspenseful by the shifting loyalties between its leading players. We don’t like spoilers, but we’ll just say that the question of whether there is “honor among thieves” is key to the story’s endgame.

Massalas, a London-educated Greek filmmaker with an impressive catalogue of short films, has scored a long list of prizes at international festivals including Cannes, AFI Film Fest, and
Locarno, where in 2016 he was selected as one of the most promising new directors in the world. For his feature debut, he received support from the Greek Film Center and the Sundance Institute; with that kind of artistic pedigree behind it, it’s no surprise that “Broadway” is a deeply, almost ecstatically cinematic piece of work.

Richly visual, it evokes filmic echoes not only from the influences cited above, but from directors like Fellini, Jodorowsky, Godard, and Marcel Carné – whose epic theatrical romance “Les Enfants du Paradis” seems almost baked into its core. Yet while it may contain plenty of nods, intentional or otherwise, to past masters of the medium, it never feels stodgy or over-reverent, and audiences coming at Massalas’ movie from a less scholarly perspective will find plenty to appreciate in his own bold, artfully eclectic style – and everyone is sure to approve of his abilities as a storyteller, which enable him to pack an entire epic’s worth of plot, complete with nuanced layers and deeply-drawn character development, into a just-over-90-minute movie without ever making it feel rushed.

Yet even with all that art packed into it, the thing that makes “Broadway” a standout entry in the VOD film market is its queerness. Not only does it hinge on a cis male character donning drag, it also features a gay couple (Rafael Papad and Salim Talbi) in significant roles as members of the gang. More important, perhaps, it never uses its potentially offensive “man-hiding-out-in-drag” premise to get cheap laughs or set him up for humiliation or ridicule. On the contrary, it quickly becomes clear that Barbara is more than a disguise for Jonas; she’s an empowering influence, and he blossoms with the transformation. Is he straight or gay? Trans, gender fluid, or just a drag queen? The movie never really tells us, and in fact seems to disregard it as irrelevant. It’s an ambiguity that feels comfortable rather than challenging, and makes his romance with Nelly – along with the steamy sex scenes that come with it – somehow even more hot.

There are a few quibbles that could be made about Massalas’ film; there’s some heavy-handed foreshadowing that makes a few of its twists more predictable than they might be, and it sometimes wallows a bit too much in its symbolism. Still, in context these elements are part of the cinematic ride he takes us on, and he provides enough unexpected surprises in other areas to make up for any perceived missteps along the way. With a universally excellent cast, grounded by Lekakou’s solid, confident turn at the center of it all, “Broadway” is yet another example of the growing promise of VOD as a platform for the kind of smart, sophisticated, artfully crafted film content that just doesn’t get shown in movie theaters in post-pandemic America.

That said, “Broadway” would undoubtedly look great on the big screen, and if you’re lucky enough to be in a place where it’s on one, it’s worth making the effort. If not, don’t let that stop you – it looks pretty great on the small screen, too.

Fans of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg’s 1988 film “Dead Ringers” – starring Jeremy Irons in the dual role of Elliot and Beverly Mantle, identical twin gynecologists with a fondness for drugs, a willingness to manipulate their patients into having sex with them, and a radical vision for the future of women’s reproductive medicine – are doubtless already aware of Amazon Prime’s new limited series adaptation, which dropped on April 21. Many of them, if not most, have probably already seen all six episodes.

For anyone else, however, it might feel like a perfectly reasonable question to ask why anyone might be drawn to a story with a premise as twisted, dark, and deeply disquieting as this one – but of course, those are the very things that make it irresistible.

The original “Dead Ringers” – which Cronenberg and screenwriter Norman Snider adapted from a novel (“Twins”) by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland – is considered a masterpiece of “body horror,” a sub-genre that plays on our instinctive fear of mutilation, deformity, or other such intrusive desecrations of our physical beings. It’s a brooding story of co-dependence and isolation, with Irons delivering two distinctively different but equally disturbing flavors of narcissistic amorality as the two brothers spiral away from the outside world into the private reality they’ve built around their obsessions and the unique advantages that come with being identical twins. At its essence, its biggest horrors are more psychological than visceral, and watching the slow-but-inevitable self-destruction that unspools from the Mantles’ insular and distorted perceptions is a painful but gripping journey that sticks with you in ways you wish it wouldn’t; still, there is a definite “gross-out” factor involved (the pair’s baroquely sinister, custom-designed gynecological tools are enough to make us cringe by the power of imagination alone) that lingers even longer, and makes the movie difficult to watch even for less squeamish viewers.

In Amazon’s updated reimagining of the story, the central narrative takes advantage of its long-form presentation to explore the twisted psychology of its twin protagonists – though that doesn’t feel like quite the right word, all things considered – and the fascination with body horror remains, but show developer and head writer Alice Birch changes almost everything else – starting with the gender of her two leading characters, though they still bear the same ambiguously androgynous names. It’s a bold transformation that might seem like a gimmick, at first, but quickly brushes past any skepticism to illuminate the story in a provocative new light – and we’re not just talking about the obvious lesbian implications inherent in the premise of female gynecologists seducing their own patients.

Now portrayed by Rachel Weisz, the Mantles are not merely successful, they are renowned, running their own clinic and pursuing their dream of opening a birthing center and research facility where they can help more women while developing new innovations in female fertility. Beverly, sweet-tempered and idealistic, is often at odds with the more aggressive and cynical Elliot, particularly over the ethics involved in achieving their various goals (such as accepting funding for their project from a Big Pharma billionaire or impersonating one another to trick a sexual conquest into bed), but they are nevertheless the center of each other’s lives. As in the film, it’s this closed-off interpersonal dynamic that leads them astray, severing them from the rest of the world and fueling their secretive, transgressive behavior.

Where the original’s observational focus was placed squarely on the twins, however, Birch and her creative crew open things up to take a wider view, and they waste no time in turning a critical and sometimes outrageously satirical eye toward the outside world.

These moments occasionally veer a little over the top, such as with an extended second-episode sequence in which a dinner party with potential donors becomes an almost Fellini-esque display of disconnected self-indulgence among the privileged elite, but on a more subtle level they help ally our sympathies with Beverly and Elliot. The world they move in is full of boldfaced arrogance, craven hypocrisy, tone-deaf pretension, and unapologetic greed; how can we not take their side, when it’s clear the medical establishment which they seek to upend deserves everything they can do to it and more?

Of course, their own motives are murky, too. Much is kept mysterious about the Mantles, with secrets doled out in small, sometimes cryptic revelations, and we are kept off balance by an unreliable narrative structure that isn’t always linear and frequently jumps from reality to imagination without making it quite clear which is which. We’re never sure if what we’re seeing is really happening – or when it’s happening, for that matter.

All of that goes a long way toward keeping us hooked into “Dead Ringers” as it goes further and further down its crooked path, and a few heavily-portioned moments of gore – much of it related to childbirth and the medical procedures that take place around it – certainly keep us on edge. Likewise, the gender-swapped reframing introduces a layer of feminism by challenging us with a depiction of women exploiting other women – almost all the characters who hold power are female – to facilitate what ultimately descends into a whirlpool of self-serving hedonism.

Yet as intriguing as all those ideas might be, they’re never as compelling as we think they are going to be. Even the queer aspects of the story feel a bit rote, though perhaps it’s refreshing that lesbian lead characters and depictions of lesbian sex are handled as if their queerness is “no big deal.” Nor does “Dead Ringers” ever really scare, though it does unsettle.

That’s because at its core, it’s a tale about identity, about two sides of a single personality caught in a never-ending struggle for domination. It would be simplistic to equate Bev and Elliot to “good” and “evil” sides of our nature, though there are definite echoes of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in their interlocked personas, but the conflict between them is primal, nonetheless, and that’s where the meat of the story lies. All the rest is seasoning.

Fortunately, Rachel Weisz – a criminally underrated actress, and we say this knowing she is an Oscar-winner – takes charge from the start, delivering a tour de force dual performance that is every bit the equal of Irons’ acclaimed turn in Cronenberg’s film while making both roles uniquely her own. Compelling, layered, likeable, monstrous, fragile, fierce, and always authentic, she holds our interest even when the story flags – as it occasionally does – and keeps us watching all the way.

Thanks to her, Amazon’s “Dead Ringers” confidently carves a place of its own. Is it scary? Maybe not as much so as Cronenberg’s original, but it has an appeal of its own and enough clinical gore to provide at least a few enjoyable jump scares.

In any case, neither version is as scary as the fact that the novel which was the basis for them both was itself based on the story of the Marcus twins, a pair of real-life twin gynecologists who died in an apparent suicide pact.

It’s enough to make you never trust a doctor again.