Critics reviews

Hands down the best queer film of the past ten years. Forget that it was made with iPhones (although that’s so cool), the story of two transladies of the evening on a tear one night in L.A. is wildly authentic, gorgeously shot, and the best movie about friendship since Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow.

Tangerine is a rare kind of film about transgender experiences... It's also rare in the way its formal elements work in concert with its subject matter. Director Sean Baker shot the film entirely on iPhones, utilizing this cheap technology to create something strikingly cinematic. Tangerine, both in content and in form, is about creating beauty from a position of marginalization and limited means.

This is the usual cinematic trajectory used to create images around transgender women: the cisgender gaze wrests bodily autonomy away from the transgender person. Laurence Anyways and Dallas Buyer's Club are only two examples, but both show a misunderstanding of how trans women should be represented in an art-house and foreign high-brow binary. For mainstream cinema transgender women simply do not exist. In Tangerine, the characters own the frame and do so because of collaboration.

Tangerine" is a highly performative movie that achieves a documentary spontaneity and, given its self-invented principals, feels as if it could have been generated by its cast.

Of all the visions of cinema's possible future on offer at La Roche, it was Sean Baker's Tangerine that was the most fully formed, one of those rare films that is so entertaining you could easily overlook the intricacy of its construction.

What's most significant about Tangerine is that the format proves the quality of the content of the film. It isn't brilliant because it's shot on iPhones, it's brilliant because its aesthetic suits its narrative, and the narrative is a new style of fast-paced, melodramatic realism.

Tangerine is loud and brash and bright, a highly-saturated but also exquisitely beautiful account of strange encounters, an LA underbelly and female friendship.

The immediacy of the handheld camerawork – coupled with the actors' semi-improvised dialogue, which is mostly drawled out in long strings of slang-peppered invective – plunges the viewer straight in at the deep end of their hardscrabble existence, where they eke out a precarious living while battling to maintain some dignity in the face of the ridicule and disgust of mainstream society. The result is so grippingly watchable that the type of camera being used is really neither here nor there.

Tangerine moves fast, rocket-boosting from one screwball showdown to the next on the vim of its endlessly watchable, largely untrained cast (both Rodriguez and Taylor are making their screen debuts) and its swaggering soundtrack. It's often hysterically funny, thanks to both its vinegary dialogue and the casual absurdity of its heroines' everyday lives.

Tangerine is, among other things, a film with a vivid and compellingly realised sense of locality. It exudes a street-level grit and vitality, its close-quarters portrait of the sidewalks and strip-malls of this LA neighbourhood intimate and freewheeling.

Tangerine is possibly [Baker's] most accomplished film to date and the upward trajectory of his filmography bodes well as far as his potentialities are concerned... Always on the verge of spinning out of control, the film holds all of its characters together and on the same emphatic narrative plane, alternating furious vortexes with pensive suspensions.

It's a breezy film, but also a gritty one, rooted in everyday details that Baker and cowriter Chris Bergoch learned from transsexual prostitutes they got to know around the area where the movie was shot. And thanks to Baker's fly-on-the-wall approach, Tangerine is disarmingly intimate as well.