The Delta

A treasure of the 1990s’ New Queer Cinema, Ira Sachs’s incisive debut feature moodily evokes the wide space between dreams, desires, and fulfillment in post-Vietnam War America via the romance between Lincoln (Shayne Gray), an affluent white teenager, and Minh (Thang Chan) the immigrant son of a poor Vietnamese woman and a Black GI. The vivid setting is a little-seen, little-known Memphis, a city where kids get through their nights by drinking and doing drugs and gay men struggle with questions of personal identity and fulfillment. When Lincoln and Minh set off on a boat down the Mississippi, could it just be another in a long series of failed escapes? (Criterion)