The Boys in the Band (2020)

The result is a sophisticated, tart-tongued revival, and a gayed-up “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that surmounts the challenges faced by stage-to-screen adaptations, specifically the utter confinement to a single space.

To run the fool’s errand of divorcing the film from a political context and examine it merely qualitatively, Joe Mantello’s starry-eyed stab at the material is thrilling, an exciting cobbling together of consummate performers delivering acid dipped quips and making the Greenwich Village apartment the film is set in a both dramatically and cinematically elastic playground.

It is all unexpectedly potent, particularly in the absurdity and petulance and pain that Parsons crams into his performance. It’s a strange, compelling dose of unhappiness.

Strongly acted and effectively staged, The Boys In The Band has lost little of its impact in the five decades since its first debut, and is a fitting tribute to its creator Mart Crowley, who died in March.

Mantello is the first to tell people he hasn’t had a lot of experience directing movies (his last feature was the 1997 adaptation of his Broadway hit Love! Valour! Compassion!), yet his version of Boys fights its stage roots far more than Friedkin’s film.