Critics reviews

What makes Paris Is Burning so bluntly bittersweet up to this day is that the queer longings portrayed in it — the desire for a better life, the yearning to be loved — were unfulfilled then, and remain impossible today. For all its missteps, Livingston’s film is a touchstone in queer cinema because it captures the utter brutality of queer tenacity: to make utopia is to know that you might not live to see it.

Livingston’s wildly entertaining, deeply humanitarian and fundamentally educational film... though it’s nearly three decades old, it feels as vibrant and bracingly honest as it has always been.

At times intimate and raw, Paris is Burning tries to capture the powerful essence of walking the floor to thunderous cheers and sometimes boos.

Paris Is Burning has persisted all these years in part due to the charisma of lines like these—sharp, complex, a life’s worth of wisdom packed into a few punchy sentences—and in part due to the substance of the wisdom itself.

The film and the criticism it inspires encourage audiences to think more deeply about how dynamics of sexuality, race, class, gender, power, and privilege intersect as the subjects articulated how elements of marginalization can be compounded within communities.

Livingston creates an after-life for the queer icons of the New York ball scene. She builds a memorial to lives to whom (to quote Marsha P. Johnson) nobody promised a tomorrow; she created a legacy of their todays for the people of tomorrow to honor.

It holds up moderately for re-release now, though nothing dates like fashion and it should perhaps have been offered in a re-edited or extended form, offering a historical perspective, and noting that many of the participants are now sadly dead.

A revealing snapshot of an American counterculture whose political subtext is as intriguing as its camp content.

This 1990 documentary does for voguing what David LaChappelle’s ‘Rize’ recently did for krumping: provides a fascinating portrait of a complex, materially disadvantaged subculture structured around intensely competitive aesthetic displays later plundered for a Madonna video.

Paris Is Burning remains a rich, insightful social document from an age when a guy in a frock could still raise an eyebrow.

Paris Is Burning encapsulates New York at the end of the '80s, examining how a group of outcasts made a home there, using theft and ingenuity.

Seemingly amorphous, the film is actually structured as a series of contrasts between dreams and reality, pretending and being... Livingston’s preference for feeling over exoticism secures an ultimately hopeful study of the search for personal wholeness.