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

Logan (DVD Review) – Wolverine & Professor X sure say f**k more than they used to!

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There have been increasing grumblings in some circles that too many superhero movies feel like they’ve come off a production line and are all pretty much the same as one another. Included in that grumbling has been Fox’s X-Men movies, but in the last couple of years they’ve also produced two standalone movies set in that universe – Deadpool and now Logan – that have really felt different and have shown that there are all sorts of possibilities in the world of comic books.

Although Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine has had two previous non X-Men movies, this is a very different beast to the earlier film, having more in common with a western or a road movie than a traditional superhero film. [Read more…]

Manchester By The Sea (Blu-ray Review) – Inside broken lives doing their best in the Oscar-winning film

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Despite allegations of past sexual assault swirling around Casey Affleck, he picked up the Best Actor Oscar for Manchester By The Sea, with Kenneth Lonergan also winning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Judging purely from what’s on the screen, you can see why they won, as Affleck puts in an extremely good performance, working from a nicely nuanced script which prizes emotion but tries to avoid cliché.

Affleck is Lee Chandler, who’s working as a janitor in Boston. He drinks too much, barely socialises and gets in trouble for being rude to tenants. He gets a call to say that his brother has died and so he heads to his hometown of Manchester, Massachusetts. Lee also knows he’ll have to help look after his teenage nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges) but isn’t prepared for that fact his brother has named him as Patrick’s guardian, something he doesn’t feel vaguely able to handle. [Read more…]

4 Days In France (DVD Review) – A gay man goes cruising to a different life

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Pierre (Pascal Cervo) leaves Paris and goes into the French countryside. He’s left on a whim, wandering off into the unknown with only a vague sense of where he might end up. What he does have is a gay hook-up app, which pings wherever he goes with new opportunities. Indeed, Grindr almost becomes his compass.

As he travels around looking for sexual experiences with men old and young, he also meets various other people, including a singer who he takes to a care home for a performance, a bookseller who he used to know when she taught him English, and a woman he catches robbing him. He finds different types of connection with them, as well as with a young man he sleeps with who wants him to deliver a letter, a businessman who seems to both want sex and rejects it, and an older man where the promise of a hook-up soon develops into something different. [Read more…]

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (Blu-ray Review)

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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 was an entertaining movie but there’s no doubt that it largely felt like it was laying the groundwork and building us up for Part 2. Now that film is coming to Blu-ray, so that those who didn’t catch it in cinemas can find out how the struggle between the Districts and the Capitol ends.

Panem is now in full-scale Civil War, with Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) having been enrolled as the Mockingjay, a figurehead that District 13 President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) wants to use for propaganda purposes. However, all Katniss really wants is to kill President Snow (Donald Sutherland) in the hope it will bring everything to an end. She also becomes increasingly suspicious of Coin, concerned that if she takes control after the Capitol collapses, they could be simply replacing one despot with another. [Read more…]

Child 44 (Blu-ray Review)

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When it was first announced Child 44 seemed like a good bet – based on a hit book, directed by Daniel Espinosa (Safe House, Easy Money) and a really good cast. However, when it arrived in cinemas it was met with bad reviews and made hardly any money at the box office.

I’m not entirely sure where all the animosity came from though, as while it has quite a few problems it’s certainly tense, uneasy and very watchable.

Set in post-World War II Soviet Russia, Tom Hardy is Leo Demidov, an investigator for the feared MGB who roots out traitors for Stalin. The organisation is judge, jury and executioner – and it extracts ways to find guilt in everyone they arrest. It’s an era of massive paranoia and one where deviating from the official line on something can be a death sentence. [Read more…]

Boys On Film 6: Pacific Rim (DVD)

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Read our reviews of the other Boys On Film short film collections here.

The Boys On Film DVD series of gay short film compilations heads to the opposite side of the world for an octet of movies from Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, South Korea and Hawaii. Perhaps a little less gay exclusive than previous releases, it’s a very eclectic bunch of films.

We’re reviewing all the Boys On Film discs ahead of the release of Boys On Film: Cruel Britannia on May 28th, so let’s take a look at the Pacific Rim shorts: [Read more…]

The Gospel According To St. Matthew (Blu-ray)

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It’s rather odd that one of the most acclaimed religious films ever was made by Pier Paolo Pasolini, an affirmed atheist who was also responsible some of the most controversial movies ever, such as Salo Or The  120 Days Days Of Sodom. The Gospel According To St. Matthew came about 10 years before Salo, but still shows a unique filmmaker not afraid to let his voice be known.

The film is one of the few biblical movies that the Vatican has given its seal of approval, largely because it’s rather beautiful, poetic and sticks very close to the text of the book it’s based on, with most of the dialogue taken directly from the Bible. However Pasolini concentrates on the political side of Jesus, with Christ coming across a very intense, single-minded, rather humourless figure, whose ideas come across as surprisingly Marxist. [Read more…]

The Slipper And The Rose (DVD)

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While it may not be the greatest musical classic in history, it’s ridiculous that it’s taken this long to get The Slipper And The Rose onto DVD in the UK. Made in 1976 (at a time when musicals weren’t popular, irrespective of whether they were any good or not), the movie is an adaptation of Cinderella, although unlike most versions of the story, it concentrates as much on the prince as Cinders.

Richard Chamberlain plays Prince Edward, who believes people should marry for love, but who is trapped in a world governed by protocol, position and diplomacy, where his regal parents are obsessed with ensuring he makes a match that ensures an alliance with another country. [Read more…]

J. Edgar

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There’s an old adage on the standup comedy circuit that the only thing worse than complete silence to greet your routine is a couple of stifled chuckles. This, they say, indicates that not only has your material failed, it has done so in such a way that the audience’s only response is to laugh at its failure.

Had Clint Eastwood, the director of J.Edgar attended the screening of his film that I did, he might have had a similar feeling. The last thing one would expect from a serious political biopic is moments of unintentional hilarity, but from the minute Leonardo DiCaprio appears on screen in an unconvincing elderly prosthetic, that’s exactly what you get. [Read more…]

Brazil (Blu-ray)

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A masterpiece to some, a source of utter befuddlement to others, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil has been dividing opinions now for over 25 years. Now it reaches Blu-ray, which is certainly a good way to show off the film’s extraordinary production design.

Set in a dystopian mix of the future and the past, Jonathan Pryce plays Sam Lowry, a man trying to live a quiet life as part of a vast bureaucracy, but who has extravagant dreams where he’s a flying, monster-slaying hero. During his waking life though, he’s mainly trying to be efficient and stop his plastic surgery obsessed mother from pushing him around. [Read more…]