High Art

In a revelatory performance, Ally Sheedy stars in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s debut feature, a wry and incisive look at the politics of the New York art scene wrapped in the guise of an emotionally spiky queer romance. When Lucy Berliner (Sheedy), a once prominent photographer who has retreated into a life of heroin abuse with her faded-actress lover (Patricia Clarkson), is rediscovered by Syd (Radha Mitchell), an up-and-coming editor at a photography magazine, professional ambition and personal attraction become dangerously entwined. Stripping away art-world glamour to tell a seductive yet troubling story of complicated human connection, High Art stands as an essential work of both queer and 1990s independent cinema.