Milk

Gus Van Sant is wise enough to keep this one clean of his avant-garde fingerprints, knowing that his responsibility is to present the facts of the gay civil rights movement with clarity and sobriety. The only indicator of Van Sant's involvement is the surety of direction and overall quality of the product. Much of the credit should go to the screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, whose screenplay (written on spec) distills and gracefully relates the parallel stories of Harvey Milk, the Castro District of San Francisco, and the national campaign for gay rights in the 1970s.

Social conservatives should take note that the controversial issues of thirty years ago (e.g. the right of homosexuals to hold jobs, teach school, rent & own real estate) are in the democratic society of today a matter of course. This is called progress, and the next generation will see the right to gay marriage as a matter of course.