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

New Queer Visions: Men From The Boys (VoD Review) – The gay film festival strand brings us a short film collection

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For several years New Queer Visions has been presenting programmes of LGBT short films at various film festivals. Now some of the shorts that have been screened by NVQ have been brought together into a package available for us all to watch via Filmdoo (worldwide) and Amazon (in both the UK and US).

While a previous New Queer Visions collection we covered concentrated on female-led films, this one is all about the boys. They range from how sexuality touches race and ethnicity to dating someone deep in the closet. Take a look at what we thought of the films below. [Read more…]

Tomcat (DVD Review) – Can a gay relationship withstand inexplicable violence?

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Tomcat is a bit of a tough movie to review. Much of the film pivots around a single, shocking moment, which takes place around a third of the way into the film. However, revealing too much about it would take us into spoiler territory, and it’s the sort of thing the needs to come as a surprise – although the amount of foreshadowing may give you a clue something ominous is gonna happen. That said, there are some who’ll be genuinely shocked and probably won’t be able to get past that moment.

Andreas (Philipp Hochmair) and Stefan (Lukas Turtur) are a seemingly happy gay couple, with fulfilling careers and plenty of loving friends. They live in a beautiful house with their cat, Moses. Their lives are full of music, sex, socialising and a sense of connection with both each other and those around them. [Read more…]

Urban Hymn (DVD Review) – Can music bring hope to a discarded youth?

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Jamie (Letitia Wright) is a young woman who’s been brought up in children’s homes and is used to being treated as a problem to be ‘handled’. Together with her tough best friend Leanne (Isabella Laughland) she’s not averse to getting into a bit of trouble, including getting involved in the 2011 London riots.

When new children’s home worker Kate (Shirley Henderson) shows an interest in her music, Jamie assumes this is just another do-gooder with no clue how to actually help. However, after Kate invites Jamie to audition for the choir she’s a part of, Jamie starts to wonder whether there really is a new opportunity here and someone who really wants to help and support her. However, it’s not going to be an easy road, especially as Leanne is determined not to accept any help, and with her need to violently retaliating to maintain status and to demand people meet her on her dangerous terms, she could prevent Jamie from making the most of the opportunities her music could offer. [Read more…]

San Andreas (Blu-ray Review)

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If you’d hoped that having Lost’s Carlton Cuse writing the screenplay would result in San Andreas being a more cerebral form of disaster movie, you should realise he was also an executive producer on Nash Bridges, so he is not averse to more straightforward entertainment. Indeed, it’s almost like he watched every Roland Emmerich movies – from 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow to Independence Day and Godzilla – and then used that as his template, but cut out anything too intelligent.

There is little to surprise here, although it certainly delivers on the large sale mayhem.

Dwayne Johnson is Los Angeles helicopter rescue pilot Ray, who’s dealing with the collapse of his marriage following the death of one of his children. However, he’s soon going to have more than that to worry about (actually, that’s not true as that’s all he cares about), when earthquakes start devastating California, starting at the Hoover Dam and then working its way up to San Francisco. And wouldn’t you know it, Ray’s daughter is in San Francisco, and so he sets off to rescue her, dodging city destroying shaking, tsunamis and general building destroying catastrophe along the way, as the San Andreas fault splits apart, resulting in the biggest quakes ever known. [Read more…]

52 Tuesdays (DVD Review)

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Aussie movie 52 Tuesdays premiered at Sundance (where it won a Best Director prize) and has garnered as fair amount of interest and praised, both due to its subject and the way it was made. The film was shot one day a week over the space of a year, with the script and story evolving over that time. It’s not the first time it’s been done, and to be honest it’s a technique that has rarely created anything that feels like it was better than if they’d just stuck with a pre-determined script.

52 Tuesdays is about teenager Billie and her mother Jane. Billie’s life changes when Janes informs her daughter that she wants her to go and live with her father, to give Jane space while she starts transitioning to life as a man. Initially Billie isn’t sure how to react, especially as Jane – now James – seems uncertain whether she wants her daughter around, and the teen doesn’t know quite how to react to that. [Read more…]

Trash (Blu-ray Review)

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I’d like to think that when putting Trash together the people behind it weren’t sitting there purely trying to think what would be most likely to win them lots of Oscars, but it does slightly come across like that at times. You’ve got a setting that is Slumdog Millionaire meets City of God, a plot that’s somewhat gritty but also a bit of a fairytale, a director who’s already got three Best Director Oscar nominations under his belt (Stephen Daldry), a script from Richard ‘Four Weddings’ Curtis and the lead roles given to sweet, non-professional Brazilian kids.

If they were hoping for Oscars, they failed, but the movie isn’t bad at all, using its semi-fairytale story to create something that is sort of a family/young adult film, but one that wants viewers young and old to know that the slums can be a dark and dangerous place, and that children aren’t immune from that. [Read more…]

The Imitation Game (Blu-ray Review)

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Despite eight Oscar nominations The Imitation Game only walked away with one award, Best Adapted Screenplay. To be honest that wasn’t a shock, as quite a few Oscar watchers had thought it would get nothing. And there are also some, including myself, wondering if the one Academy Award it did win was the right one.

The movie tells the story of Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), a socially awkward, somewhat irascible mathematics prodigy who, after the Second World War breaks out, applies to the government to help break the infamous Enigma code, something many believe is impossible. However he doesn’t want to continue with the traditional method of codebreaking, where smart men use pens, paper and just their brains, as he has an idea to use a machine to break down and then check the billions of possible combinations until it finds the right one. If he can do it, it will allow the Allies to read the German military’s secret communications and possibly win the war. [Read more…]

In Their Room: San Francisco/Berlin/London (DVD Review)

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Travis Mathews certainly hasn’t had a traditional film career. He started out with the semi-documentary art project In Their Room, which led to him teaming up with a gay porn company for the short film I Want Your Love. That short was then made into a feature-length movie, which led to Travis’ highest-profile project yet, his collaboration with James Franco, Interior Leather Bar.

However it was the first In Their Room project that brought him to the film world’s attention. It started as a series of separate five-to-ten minute films, each going into the bedroom of a different gay man, where they discuss their lives and desires, and most particularly their sexual thoughts. The shorts became known for their sexual frankness, with some including masturbation and many featuring at least a little nudity. However what impressed most was the surprising intimacy and seeming honesty that Mathews managed to capture about gay men’s lives. [Read more…]

Joe (DVD Review)

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Nicolas Cage may be an Oscar-winning actor, but in recent years he’s largely become synonymous with an endless string of not particularly great movies where he gives one of his interchangeable extreme wild-man performances, where restraint is regarded as an alien concept.

Joe gives us something a little different, with Cage playing title character Joe Ransom, a character who spends much of the movie trying to keep a lid on the fiery, violent temper that lies underneath. It was an extremely smart move to cast the actor, as you can genuinely feel Cage pulling in the tics and extreme tendencies he has shown in endless movies in the last few years. [Read more…]

My Straight Son (DVD Review)

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Diego is a photographer in Venezuela, living a nice life where he can go out to clubs and restaurants, and spend time with his doctor boyfriend, Fabrizio. However his life takes an abrupt right turn when his teenage son, Armando, arrives from Spain to visit and quickly realises that his dad is gay – something the young man isn’t that impressed about. Around the same time Fabrizio is beaten into a coma, leaving Diego reeling.

Diego’s friends become an unconventional family while he tries to deal with what happened to his boyfriend and also attempts to reconnect with his son. [Read more…]