A double feature for film buffs.

For the movie fan in your life, film scholar Jenni Olson has a delightful double offering: The Queer Movie Poster Book (Chronicle Books), boasting a foreword by queer comedy's capo di tutti capi Bruce Vilanch, and Homo Promo (Strand Releasing), a DVD compilation of trailers of yore dealing with the love that dared not speak its name while also longing for its close-up. "I think the book and the BVD are each a wonderful introduction to the world of LGBT cinema," declares the San Francisco-based Olson. "The posters are so colorful, and the trailers are so dynamic; together they offer a wildly entertaining crash course in queer film history." And indeed they do. Leafing through the book, you'll find beautiful reproductions of poster art for such rarities as Madchen in Uniform, The Gay Deceivers, and Glen or Glenda? right alongside classics like Beautiful Thing and High Art.

Picking up where the book leaves off, Homo Promo offers an impromptu crash course on the years before the "New Queer Cinema" of the 1990s changed everything. Trailers for such films as Tea and Sympathy, The Children's Hour, The Killing of Sister George, Midnight Cowboy, and Death in Venice are shown without commentary. After all, what can one say when the narrator of the trailer for the breakthrough British drama Victim asks, "What crime linked an aging hairdresser and a famous star of the theater?" Well, it certainly didn't involve mousse, dear.--David Ehrenstein