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

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , , , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

Tom Cruise hasn’t had a great run recently. Mission: Impossible II in 2006 was his last bona fide hit, so it’s not surprising that he was keen to return to the franchise in the hope of keeping his star shining. What’s perhaps more surprising is that it works, as this well be the best Mission yet.

Ethan Hunt is called up for a new job – breaking into the heavily fortified Kremlin in order to retrieve some information. However after having failed to get what he went in there for, the building is destroyed in a devastating explosion. The agent quickly realises that he’s been set-up so that someone else could steal sensitive info from the Russians, destroy the building and then having everything blamed on Hunt and his team. The frame job has worked though, as the IMF is being shut down and Hunt and his crew disavowed. [Read more…]

The Iron Lady (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

If you read a variety of the reviews of The Iron Lady when it came out at cinemas, it really is like they were talking about completely different films. Everyone agrees Meryl Streep is ace, but to some it’s an apologia for a tyrant, to others a left wing fantasy, there are those who feel its concentration on her old age is schadenfreude taking pleasure in her mental problems, while a few believe it is a suitably reverential, right wing look at a great woman and will make people with a liberal philosophy take stock.

The problem with making a movie about Margaret Thatcher is that she’s such a divisive figure that people come to anything about her incapable of viewing it through anything but the prism of their own prejudices. The film is actually quite agnostic on whether she was a hero or villain, which makes it even easier to paint your own thoughts onto the movie. [Read more…]

The Future (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

It’s rare that I’ve been so intrigued by a film and wanted to punch the screen so much at the same. Writer/director/star Miranda July has a dedication to quirkiness that will be adored by some and infuriate others, but in The Future it’s the rather unlikable lead characters who prove most divisive.

Personally I loved the voiceovers by cats, random time stoppages, conversations with the moon, crawling t-shirts, and children digging foxholes, which have completely ruined the film for some – it was everything I thought was potentially problematic. The basic plot sees a pair of hipsters in their mid-30s, Sophie & Jason (July and Hamish Linklater), deciding to adopt a cat – although they have to wait a month until Paw-Paw can be released from the animal hospital. This sets off a bit of an early midlife crisis for the pair. The cat is their first actual commitment, and it suddenly makes them think about The Future. [Read more…]

The Execution Of Private Slovik (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

Made in 1974, The Execution Of Private Slovik is, as the title suggests, about the execution of a soldier, in this case the only person put to death by the US military for desertion since the Civil War. Martin Sheen plays Eddie Slovik, who is initially ineligible for the draft due to his criminal past, but as the war drags on and the need for soldiers gets more desperate, gets called up.

While his wife tries to get him out of the army, he’s forced into a rifle unit, which may not be the best place for him as he doesn’t like gun. Once in Europe he quickly decides the front line isn’t the place for him, as he’s too terrified and becomes paralysed while under enemy fire. After a short time AWOL, which the army overlooks, he’s told he’ll be sent back to the frontline. Slovik refuses to go, saying he can only take an assignment back from the front line as he’s a bad frontline soldier and will just be a liability to his unit. His decision to make a stand leads to a court martial and the ultimate sentence. [Read more…]

Freud (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

It’s very peculiar that despite Montgomery Clift and Susannah York starring in the film and the legendary John Huston behind the camera, Freud has never been legally available on either VHS or DVD in the UK. That’s now being addressed with this release, which gives a fresh outing for the unusual biopic.

Rather than covering the whole of Sigmund Freud’s life, the film concentrates on the years from 1885 to 1890 when he was developing his most famous theories. Against the backdrop of a medical establishment who believed mental problems either had a physiological cause or were just people pretending, Freud began to explore the idea of the unconscious and his ‘talking cure’, which sought to uncover memories the patient had suppressed and by unlocking them, cure the problems they faced (or at least that’s the overly simplified way it works in the film). [Read more…]

The Lady (Blu-ray)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

Unless you’re a member of Burma’s former military junta, pretty much everyone can agree that Aung San Suu Kyi is a great person who’s had to endure a lot. However she’s also a human being, something The Lady seems to forget. Instead here she’s a saint taking on demons, which results in a film that’s informative but earnest and rather dull.

Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh) is the daughter of the man who negotiated Britain’s independence from Britain but who was assassinated the same year by his political rivals. However, when the film opens she is living as an Oxford housewife with her academic husband, Michael (David Thewlis), and her two children. She then returns to Burma to look after her ailing mother but once there sees the brutality of the military dictatorship, which is suppressing any and all dissent with deadly force. [Read more…]

The Last Summer Of La Boyita (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

Why do people in rural Argentina, a country that speaks Spanish, look like they just fell out of 19th Century France? The continental cultural melting pot always adds an extra layer of interest to South American movies, where various European cultures from all sorts of different eras butt up against indigenous cultures and the modern world. That’s in the background of The Last Summer Of La Boyita, a charming and somewhat brave film that takes a look at the ambiguity of gender, as seen through the eyes of children [Read more…]

Romantics Anonymous (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

When Romantics Anonymous opened with a scene featuring lead character Angelique (Isabelle Carre) falling into a dead faint at the eponymous support group for the overly quixotic, I almost switched the DVD off. It wasn’t because there was anything wrong with this particular sequence, but I wasn’t sure I could physically take yet another film where a quirky yet loveable misfit manages to find an equally out of place love interest to complement them.  It seems to be the plot for every other indie or foreign movie out there at the moment, and to be frank, I didn’t think I could take another one!

However I had to write a review and so I persevered, and I’m glad I did. [Read more…]

Murder By Decree (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , , , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

Sherlock Holmes is famously the most adapted literary character of all time, appearing in more different film and TV incarnations than anyone else. Nowadays we have Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch representing two different but rather 21st Century Sherlocks (whether set in the modern day or not), but in 1979 Christopher Plummer donned the deerstalker, with James Mason as his Watson.

Rather than being based on any of Arthur Conan Doyle#s original stories, Murder By Decree tries to raise some extra interest by getting Sherlock involved in the Jack the Ripper killings. When the gruesome Whitechapel murders begin, Holmes expects to be called in by the police, but they’re rather deliberately keeping him at arms-length. [Read more…]

Booked Out (DVD)

By Leave a Comment

Starring: , ,
Director:
Running Time:
Certificate:
Release Date: ,

Booked Out is a sweet but small-scale movie that was always going to have difficulty finding large-scale distribution, and so it’s going with a rather charming DIY-feeling release strategy, with a DVD & Blu-ray release on Monday, alongside a cinema tour with accompanying Q&As all over the country between now and mid-April (you can find out more about that here).

The film follows artist and bookstore worker Ailidh (Mirren Burke), who’s seen a young man coming and going from another one of the flats in her building and so she manufactures a way of meeting him – by acting as if she’s accidentally dropped all her drawings on him. The man turns out to be Jacob (Rollo Weekes), and soon a friendship develops between the two of them, partly due to Ailidh drawing Jacob into helping her with fellow neighbour Mrs. Nicholls, whose husband died several years before, although she still acts as if he’s alive, well and in the house. [Read more…]