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

Hotel Transylvania 2 (DVD Review)

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Hotel Transylvania was a far bigger success than many people expected. Indeed, even Sony Pictures appeared to be taken by surprise, but it didn’t take them long to decide a sequel was needed. That follow-up quickly takes us through the next few years of the story, which sees monsters and humans starting to get along better across the world.

Dracula’s daughter Mavis marries slacker boyfriend Jonathan and they have a child, Dennis. As Dennis is only half-vampire, it’s not clear whether he will end up being a monster or not, but Dracula is determined that before he’s five, his grandson will spout fangs, as he knows that otherwise he will remain human forever. Mavis meanwhile feels that if Dennis is indeed more human than monster, perhaps it would be better if they went to live in the ‘normal’ world. [Read more…]

Stand (DVD Review)

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In the time since Russia enacted it’s rather draconian ‘gay propaganda’ laws, much has been written about the chilling effect it’s had on LGBT people in the country and also how it has emboldened homophobes to feel they can act against gay people with impunity, which has led to vicious attacks, torture and beatings.

Stand takes us into this world and the lives of gay Russian couple Anton and Vlad, who live together and have a life where they know that as long as they keep their sexuality behind closed doors and amongst those they trust, they can live a fairly safe and happy life. However, while driving along they witness a vicious attack on a gay man. With Vlad fearful of what will happen if they intervene, they end up doing nothing. [Read more…]

Those People (Frameline Review)

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It’s always good when a film is a pleasant surprise, especially when it’s because the movie knows what you were expecting and then slightly subverts those expectations. It’s something that Those People manages, but not in a showy, arrogant way – just by showing there’s more to its subject and different ways to look at things than you might initially expect.

Charlie (Jonathan Gordon) is young man from a well-off New York family who’s in college studying to be an artist. His best friend, Sebastian (Jason Ralph), is from an even more elite background, but he has a few problems, due to the fact his father has just been locked up for serious white collar fraud. However, that hasn’t stopped Sebastian being spoiled, entitled and difficult – but even so Charlie cannot help but love him. [Read more…]

The Skeleton Twins (DVD Review)

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With SNL alumni Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader in the lead roles, you could be forgiven for thinking this would be a riotous gross-out laugh-fest, but right from the first few scenes The Skeleton Twins sets itself to be something far more indie dramedy.

Hader and Wiig are twins Milo and Maggie who aren’t completely estranged but have severely drifted apart after he left for LA to become an actor. Things aren’t going to well though, as the movie opens with Maggie narrowly escaping death and Milo attempting suicide. He heads back to their hometown to stay with Maggie and try to start over, but they soon discover that reuniting isn’t easy and that neither of them is in a place in their lives where they feel they should be. [Read more…]

Continuum (DVD Review)

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You have to admire sci-fi that really wants to be intelligent, even if it’s not actually as smart as it thinks it is. That’s certainly true of Continuum (known as I’ll Follow Your Down in the US), which wants to bring together time-travel, wormholes and quantum theory to create a tale that considers the idea of what it would mean to change your past so that your present never happened. However it’s not really that smart and seems to ignore many of the most important implications of what it’s talking about.

Gabe (Rufus Sewell) heads off on a business trip but never returns, leaving his wife (Gillian Anderson) and young son Errol with no clues as to what happened to him – he never checked out of his hotel and has completely disappeared. 12 years later his wife still hasn’t gotten over what happened, while the massively intelligent Errol (now grown up to be Haley Joel Osment) is trying to make his way in the world as a young adult. [Read more…]

Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine (DOC NYC Review)

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There are some people who become totemic. Their name and/or image are indelibly associated with something to the point that the person behind it often gets hidden or ignored. That’s certainly true of Matthew Shepard, who in October 1998 at 21-years-old was savagely beaten, tied to a fence and left for dead. By the time he passed away six days later he had become international news, with people around the world shocked at what was a truly cruel and barbaric crime motivated by homophobia.

No anti-gay crime before or since has had the kind of international impact Shepard’s death did, helping to give people a rallying point to demand change and to say that LGBT people would no longer put up with the kind of bigotry and potential violence from the homophobic society that surrounded them – especially as there were comparatively few legal protections afforded gay people. [Read more…]

Test (DVD Review)

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The TV show Looking has given us an insight into being gay in San Francisco in the 2010s, and now Test takes us back to the city as it was three decades ago, just as AIDS was emerging. Although documentaries and films such as The Normal Heart have tended to look at the advent of HIV on the entire community and the panic it caused, Test takes a smaller, more personal approach, where it hovers in the background of one man’s life.

Frankie (Scott Marlowe) is a young dancer, who’s practicing to be the understudy in a new piece. He’s heard the stories of gay men coming down with a strange illness and that there’s a new test for the disease. Slowly AIDS goes from being fairly distant to something that’s creeping ever closer to his own life, so he must decide whether to go in for the test, knowing that things he’s done could have exposed him to the virus. [Read more…]

The Machine (Cinema)

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Sometimes a film feels like an advert for what those involved could do with a little more money. The Machine is a little like that, although that’s not to say it’s a failure on its own – just that visually it’s trying to do a lot with not a lot of cash (and at that it succeeds) but the script could have done with being a little tighter. [Read more…]

Lovelace (DVD)

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How do you make a true-tale movie where the facts are in dispute? Well, you either pretend they’re not in dispute, or you try to find a way to suggest you don’t fully know what happened. Or, like Lovelace, you try to do both and trip over yourself in the process.

The film is a biopic of Linda Lovelace (Amanda Seyfried), the star of 70s porn chic hit Deep Throat, which by some reckonings is the most profitable movies ever made on the basis of budget versus its gross – however as much of the cash went through mob-controlled porn theatres, it’s impossible to know how much it actually made. [Read more…]

Spiders (DVD)

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3D has largely been limited to the cinema. While 3D Blu-ray has attempted to bring it to the small screen, nearly all the releases have been for cinema movies when they come to the home. However Spiders comes direct to Blu-ray as a 3D release, which may mark a new horizon for straight-to-disc movies. However on DVD we only get it in two-dimensions, which robs the film of a lot of the fun it might have had – which would have been mild anyway. [Read more…]