Takes you behind the scenes of the 1967 national drag queen contest held in NYC's Town Hall.

| Original Score: B- | Mar 30, 2025

The Queen is an important film not only because of it’s study of the drag queen, but because, simply, it is a very good film.

| Sep 21, 2022

Simon's camera documents a glorious age of drag with monolithic wigs, Cleopatra cut creases, and feather boas.

| Jun 9, 2021

The Queen is an eye-opening artifact from a period of queer culture that's mostly thought lost-and what an artifact it is.

| May 28, 2020

A remarkable piece of cinéma vérité journalism.

| May 28, 2020

They were courageous people who laid the groundwork for the popular and respected drag culture that exists today. These queens should not be forgotten.

| May 28, 2020

It's the spark of a true legend.

| Mar 3, 2020

This is a fantastic doc... I just thought it was fascinating and so much fun.

| Oct 2, 2019

A movie that presents and accepts. It doesn't needlessly explain, psychoanalyze its subject, or provide the distance and condescension of an ethnographic survey.

| Aug 28, 2019

The movie is by turns a historic document, a milestone of queer filmmaking...

| Aug 14, 2019

There is some backstage drama in The Queen - mostly involving the lithe, almost frustratingly pretty Harlow - but what comes across is not competition or catfights, but camaraderie.

| Aug 1, 2019

The gender identity and racial undercurrents of "The Queen" have a prescient quality, foreshadowing some of the tensions that the LGBTQ community is dealing with today.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 1, 2019

A highly entertaining snapshot from the past.

| Jul 31, 2019

"[A] fantastic time capsule from 1968...This documentary is a fascinating piece of history, captured in a style that is very much of-and ahead of-its time."

| Jul 25, 2019

The Queen is at its best as a time capsule of the internal strife in the LGBTQ community, particularly the divide between white cis men and pretty much everyone else.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 13, 2019

[A] riveting chronicle of a 1967 drag competition.

| Jul 11, 2019

The competition itself is decorous and dull.

| Jul 11, 2019

Not least for the must-see jaw-dropping bitch-fest scene courtesy of Crystal LaBeija, who was later indelibly captured in 1990's Paris is Burning, this film is truly a priceless cinematic artifact of LGBTQ and film history.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 30, 2019

It's a highly recommended and raw look at the fierceness of the drag competitions, and how the LGBTQ community has made so much progress since 1968 and yet still has so far to go.

| Jun 29, 2019

Frank Simon's The Queen (newly restored and being released theatrically by Kino Lorber) is a shockingly vibrant document of the often forgotten early days of a scene that has grown in cultural visibility in recent years.

| Jun 28, 2019