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Tangerine comes to cinemas for its 10th Anniversary, although is in the past, given it was a one-off showing.
I’d never heard of it before, and still have no idea why tangerines come into it, but it mostly centres around two transgender hookers, Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor).
The former has just got out of jail after a 28-day sentence, while the latter is performing songs at Mary’s bar at 7pm, including turning tricks during the day, including for a client who refuses to pay for her… services.
Sin-Dee’s also searching for her boyfriend/pimp, Chester (James Ransome), and the girl with whom he cheated on her, Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan). Along the way, their paths cross with Armenian taxi driver Razmik (Karren Karagulian) with a series of weird customers – including the late, great Clu Gulager as a Cherokee Indian who doesn’t really seem to know his destination – but then Razmik’s mother-in-law gets involved, his wife is less than impressed, and it all implodes on Christmas Eve!
Overall, Tangerine is interesting, but rubbish… still, entertaining rubbish. However, aside from not having any tangerines in it, there’s a superb ’80s-sounding tune in Okko’s Gotta Get Home, when Sin-Dee finally finds Chester.
Additionally, Sean Baker, who directed this film, also made the more recent Anora. I haven’t yet seen that. When it came back to cinemas after its Oscars win, I was in two minds about it as I wasn’t keen on it. It was already out on some platforms by that point, so I had a look at the first 10-15 minutes and it didn’t grab me.
It’s worth noting that because the Oscars like to tick different diversity boxes each year, they were all going to go to Emilia Perez. However, after a number of tweets from its lead surfaced, they quickly changed allegiance, so all but two of those awards were switched to Anora at the last minute. I wasn’t enamoured with Mikey Madison in Scream 5, and surely the Best Actress award should’ve gone to Demi Moore for The Substance?!
For its 10th Anniversary, I saw Tangerine at the Trafford Centre in screen 6, a 2.35:1 widescreen film which immediately had me in despair when I saw the “It’s Time” was 1.85:1 and the screen hadn’t zoomed in, so the film was windowboxed all around. However, this sometimes happens with legacy films, making me think that the distributor hadn’t sent any info out about how to present it, and no-one had looked at the film’s ratio beforehand.
I went out to the two female members of staff, mentioned “it hasn’t been zoomed in as it’s a widescreen film” (the most simple way I can describe it), they called through on their walkie-talkies (WT), heard back “Is it Tangerine?”, “Yes”, “It’s meant to be like that”. Pardon?
Before the manager arrived, a female member of staff said she’d take a look – and the whole experience sounded like they’d all had this conversation earlier in the day, in case it came up – since she also seemed to think it was normal for the screen to be windowboxed.
When the manager came, he repeated what he said over the WT – adding that it’s “an artistic choice by the director” – and as this went on, I was a bit concerned that as we were having the conversation just outside the room and with their WTs occasionally getting chat from somewhere else, that was also booming round the room of those still trying to watch what image their was on the screen.
In the end, he said he’d try and extend the image a bit (zoom in, I took it that he meant) but maintained it was meant to look like that. I remained polite, but was mostly completely bemused throughout this whole situation.
A few minutes later, they did a manual zoom, almost filling the screen, but fine for doing it on-the-fly, and a lot better than it looked before.
I really didn’t get why we were having this discussion. It was a standard 2.35:1 image. It’s not like a 2.00:1 film which still gets shown windowboxed, because they’re treated like a 1.85:1 film, and no-one in any modern cinema can be bothered to install a 2.00:1 setting for them, even though there’s around two per month on average in the cinemas (the most well-known example in recent times for this was Barbie).
Looking it up later, there’s absolutely nothing about windowboxing being Sean Baker’s intended way of presenting the film in the cinema as far as I can see. I note it was shot with an Apple iPhone 5S, and with an anamorphic adaptor, so it can essentially film a 2.35:1 image on a 16:9 screen, which is then expanded width-ways in post-production to result in a traditional 2.35:1 image, and the theatrical presentation is business as usual for any cinema.
So, either the distribution company has got their wires crossed in trying to explain this in any notes for cinemas, or whatever they’ve written has been misinterpreted at the cinema. Although if the distributor has written anything about it, they shouldn’t have done, since there’s no need for any cinema to do anything different.
Metrodome Film Distribution were the 2015 distributors, and are still active on Twitter, so I’ll follow this up with them, to see if they’ve got any info on this.
NOTE: There is NO mid- or post-credits scene.
Tangerine is in cinemas now on a limited release, and is available to buy on Blu-ray Special Edition and DVD.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 89 minutes
Release date: June 20th 2025 (re-release)
Studio: 2.35:1
Cinema: Odeon Trafford Centre
Rating: 4/10
Director: Sean Baker
Producers: Sean Baker, Karrie Cox, Marcus Cox, Darren Dean, Shih-Ching Tsou
Screenplay: Sean Baker, Chris Bergoch
Cast:
Sin-Dee Rella: Kitana Kiki Rodriguez
Alexandra: Mya Taylor
Razmik: Karren Karagulian
Dinah: Mickey O’Hagan
Ashken: Alla Tumanian
Chester: James Ransome
The Cherokee: Clu Gulager
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.