Big Gay Picture Show

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema and more

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema & more

Family Guy – Season 14 (DVD Review)

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Having just ended on BBC3 in the UK, Family Guy – Season 14 arrives on DVD in the UK. It’s perhaps the most controversial season in the show’s history – which isn’t bad going for a series that’s previously had two episodes that were fully animated and then rejected by the Fox network due to worries about their content.

However the controversy this time wasn’t due to Family Guy taking on abortion or concern about jokes about Jews – it’s because they killed off one of the main characters. Yep, a few episodes in to Season 14 Brian the faux-intellectual dog bites the big one (or at least bites the tarmac, seeing as he gets run over). However it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock to discover that this might not be the last time we see him. [Read more…]

The Newsroom – Season 2 (DVD Review)

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Aaron Sorkin is perhaps the best known writer working in entertainment today. He’s part of a very select group of people where an entire show can be sold purely on the fact he created it. He’s renowned for taking on the issues of the modern world, dissecting and criticising the problems he’s sees with America and the things that are taking it away from being the glorious nation he believes it is at heart. As a result he’s often been criticised by those who have a different view of the world – usually a more sharply right wing view – and that was certainly true of the first season of The Newsroom. [Read more…]

Hannibal – Season 2 (Blu-ray Review)

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Hannibal should have been cancelled after Season 1, but not because of its quality. It got extremely low ratings in the US (and Season 2 was just as bad), which normally means a swift demise. However thanks to the fact it’s co-production between several countries, and therefore costs NBC comparatively little to make, it’s lived on.

And that’s a damn good thing, as while it’s found it tough to find its audience on American network TV, it’s also one of the most critically lauded shows around. It’s often said that a TV show has a ‘cinematic style’, but normally it’s just hyperbole. In Hannibal’s case it’s really true. It’s visually meticulous – something you can really appreciate on Blu-ray – has a great cast and a storytelling style that doesn’t assume the audience is made up of morons. [Read more…]

Bones – Season 9 (DVD Review)

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Most shows that have made it to Season 9 are long past their prime and are pretty much coasting until the day they get cancelled, while everyone involved makes as much cash as they can in the meantime. However that’s not true for Bones, which is still fun, entertaining and slick, with a great cast and a good mix of crime-solving and humour.

Season 8 left things on a bit of a cliffhanger, with fiendish serial killer Christopher Pelant forcing FBI Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) to break off his engagement to forensic anthropologist Temperance ‘Bones’ Brennan (Emily Deschanel), without even allowing him to tell her why. It certainly adds a lot of angst to the early part of the season, although it does become a little annoying and over the top. [Read more…]

Masters Of Sex – Season 1 (DVD Review)

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Masters Of Sex is certainly a provocative title, and one that could promise a lot but deliver little. Thankfully though that’s far from the case with this excellent series, which takes a fictionalised look at the real-life Dr. Williams Master (Martin Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), who revolutionised our understanding of sex by looking at it scientifically.

It’s amazing to think that in the 1950s we’d split the atom, begun to understand quantum physics, built skyscrapers that reached over 1,000 feet into the sky, and yet we knew remarkably little about something as fundamental as sex, largely due to prurience. [Read more…]

Girls On Film: The First Date (DVD Review)

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After the success of Peccadillo’s Boys On Film series – which has so far given us 10 selections of great short films focussed on gay men – comes the lesbian-themed Girls On Film: The First Date. The disc features nine shorts, and as with the Boys On Film releases it’s a great selection that covers a broad range of topics and ideas, taking in everything from comedy to documentary.

You can take a look at what I thought of each of the shorts below: [Read more…]

Futurama – Season 7 (Blu-ray Review)

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We’re a bit behind with Futurama in the UK. While Season 7 started in 2012 in the US, we’ve only just had it on TV in the UK, quickly followed by this home entertainment release. To make things a little more confusing, this release has 13 episodes, although officially the US Season 7 has 26 instalments. However it was split in two in both countries and so we’ve still got more episodes to come in Britain. That may sound annoying, but as the show has now been cancelled (again), it is good to know us Brits have a few new episodes before the end of Futurama finally comes. [Read more…]

Helix – Season 1 (DVD Review)

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Thanks to the Battlestar Galactica reboot and his previous involvement with the rebirth of Star Trek in the 1990s, producer Ronald D. Moore is a bit of a legend in sci-fi TV circles, so it’s not surprising his presence behind-the-scenes as a producer was trumpeted strongly when Helix made its TV debut. However while it’s a decent series, it’s unlikely to be considered amongst his best.

Center For Disease Control doctor Alan Farragut (Billy Campbell) and a few of his colleagues get an unusual assignment when they’re sent to a large Arctic scientific outpost to investigate what appears to be a viral outbreak. However the symptoms are strange and Alan soon starts to realise that peculiar things have been going on, with the station’s head, Dr. Hiroshi Hatake (Hiroyuki Sanada), using the station’s remote situation to do unusual research far from the prying eyes of civilisation. [Read more…]

CSI – Season 13 (DVD Review)

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It’s often difficult for a show to survive the loss of its lead characters. 13 seasons in CSI has lost its male lead twice (William Petersen and then Laurence Fishburne) as well as its female lead (Marg Helgenberg). That’s not too surprising for a show that’s been going this long, but it is surprising that with Ted Danson and Elisabeth Shue it feels as if things have been given a bit of a second wind, and that the going-through-the-motions of the previous few seasons has been replaced by a bit of a revitalisation. [Read more…]

Orange Is The New Black – Season 1 (Blu-ray Review)

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When Netflix first announced it was going to make TV-style series, few people expected much. After all, most previous web content that stretched beyond a few minutes was absolutely dreadful. However the subscription-based internet upstart has proved they can equal or even better the US networks, with House Of Cards winning Golden Globes and Emmys, while Orange Is The New Black took TV Program Of The Year at the AFI Awards and received almost universal acclaim.

Loosely based on an acclaimed memoir, the 13 episodes of Season 1 follows Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), who’s been sentenced to a term in prison for transporting drug money and is just about to enter a US women’s federal penitentiary. That means leaving behind her nice, middle-class life and her fiancé (Jason Biggs) and going to a place she knows nothing about. [Read more…]