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

Loving Vincent (DVD Review) – Van Gogh inspires the world’s first fully painted movie

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Irrespective of anything else, Loving Vincent is an impressive achievement. It’s the world’s first animated movie that’s ‘fully painted’. In practice that means that the entire thing was filmed with actors and the using that footage it was later animated by a team of over 100 artists using oil paintings for both the characters and the background – and all done in the style of Vincent Van Gogh.

The film is set a year after Van Gogh’s death. Vincent’s friend from Arles, Postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O’Dowd), forces his slacker son, Armand (Douglas Booth), to hand deliver the artist’s final letter to his brother, Theo. After Armand discovers Theo is also dead, he travels on to the place where Vincent spent his final days, Auvers-sur-Oise, to see whether he should give the letter to the man who was supposed to be looking after him at the time, Dr. Gachet (Jerome Flynn). [Read more…]

Logan Lucky (Blu-ray Review) – Steven Soderbergh takes Channing Tatum on a blue collar heist

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Director Steven Soderbergh hasn’t done very well at retiring. After a career that’s ranged from Sex Lies & Videotape, Erin Brockovich and Traffic to the Ocean’s 11 trilogy, Out Of Sight and Magic Mike, he announced that his last feature film as a director would be 2013’s Liberace biopic, Behind The Candelabra. However, just four years later he’s back with Logan Lucky.

What appears to have brought him back wasn’t just the story and script, but that they managed to find a way to essentially cut out the usual mainstream film machine by pre-selling foreign distribution and TV/streaming rights and then releasing the movie in the US himself. [Read more…]

Dunkirk (Blu-ray Review) – Christopher Nolan goes to war in impressive fashion

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Christopher Nolan is one of the few directors who can pretty much make any movie he wants. Thanks to the success of unconventional big budget movies such as Interstellar and Inception – and of course The Dark Knight trilogy – Warner Bros. trusts him to deliver. On the surface Dunkirk seems a more straightforward proposition as it’s a World War II movie, but as this is Nolan, he’s not going to make a war film quite like anyone else.

For a start there’s remarkably little dialogue and while there are main characters, we learn comparatively little about them. Likewise, while it’s about an incredibly famous event, it’s not interested in being an exposition-heavy historical overview, complete with officers pushing little boats around a war-room map to explain to us what’s going on. Instead it’s a film that wants to create a sense of realism about the events it’s talking about. It also has an almost puzzle-box nature – three intercut stories each taking place at a slightly different time – helping to create a sense of the chaos and uncertainty for those caught up in the events of late Spring 1940. [Read more…]

The Dark Tower (Blu-ray Review) – The Stephen King fantasy saga finally makes it to the screen

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It’s a movie 10-years in the making (at least this attempt took 10 year), but when it arrived in cinemas The Dark Tower was met with negative reviews and muted box office. It currently has a pretty abysmal 16% on RottenTomatoes and just 5.9/10 from viewers on IMDB. So is it really that bad? No, it’s not, but its easy to understand why it’s had such bad reactions.

The film focuses on teenager Jake (Tom Taylor), who’s been having strange visions of a giant tower at the centre of the universe and the ‘Man In Black’ (Matthew McConaughey), who’s determined to destroy it. While those around him are beginning to think Jake is becoming unhinged, the teen discovers what he’s been seeing is real. [Read more…]

War For The Planet Of The Apes (DVD Review) – Caesar’s story reaches a dark & impressive crossroads

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The recent Planet Of The Apes prequel trilogy is probably the most consistently impressive ‘blockbuster’ franchise of the past decade. The movies break the rules far more than they’re generally given credit for, getting progressively more radical as they’ve gone along. This is, after all, a big budget, tentpole franchise where human beings are the bad guys – they’re increasingly presented as brutal, arrogant, cruel and largely deserving of being wiped off the planet.

The three movies have been about the rise of a new civilisation, becoming increasingly confident in having non-human heroes, and that the audience won’t mind siding with the apes against humanity. It’s an oddly radical thing for them to have done. They’ve also become more confident in their moral complexity. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes was essentially about an insurgency from the point of view of the insurgents, using the fact that it was apes and humans to hide the fact that its strongest parallels were about America had done in Iraq and Afghanistan. [Read more…]

Transformers: The Last Knight (Blu-ray Review) – Robots and explosions, what did you expect?

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People often complain that the big Hollywood movies have no story. If nothing else the Transformers movies have attempted to do something about that. Rather than having no story, they have all the stories, non-stop, simultaneously and accompanied by never-ending explosions. It’s never mattered whether it made any sense or if it’s managed to contradict itself in the same sentence, as long as something is going on that appears to be a plotline.

That continues with The Last Knight, which is moderately more coherent than Dark Of The Moon, and slightly less pointless than Age Of Extinction – and yes, that is damning it with faint praise, but it does mean those who’ve liked what’s gone before, will probably enjoy this one. [Read more…]

Wonder Woman (Blu-ray Review) – Can one woman beat the whole German army? Pretty much!

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Although DC’s movies have done okay at the box office, the likes of Man Of Steel, Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad certainly haven’t gained the same level of enthusiasm and fan fervour as Marvel’s movies. However, with Wonder Woman they hit the jackpot, with a movie that was well-received by critics, fans and general audiences, grossing over $800 million at the box office. It set a lot of records for a movie directed by a woman along the way, from being the most expensive film with a female director to the highest grossing.

The film starts out on the mystical island of Themyscira, home of the Amazons. Diana (Gal Gadot) has been trained to be the ultimate warrior, although her mother, Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen), is determined that she needs to be protected and shouldn’t find out the truth of her birth. [Read more…]

Against The Law (DVD Review) – A look back at one of Britain’s most infamous gay sex scandals

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Against the Law was the opening night film of this year’s BFI Flare London LGBT Film Festival and one of the centrepieces of the BBC’s Gay Britannia series. It’s easy to see why a film about Peter Wildeblood seemed apt this year. He was one of the key figures in what happened in the run up to the Wolfenden Report, which recommenced that gay male sex in England and Wales should be decriminalised. Although it took 10 years for the government to act, eventually gay sex was partly made legal 50 years ago in 1967.

The events were previously turned into a very good 2007 docudrama by Channel 4 in the form of A Very British Sex Scandal (the 50th Anniversary of the Wolfenden report). However, while A Very British Sex Scandal was mostly interested in the beginning of the story, Against The Law focuses its thematic energies on what happened next. It also includes documentary elements, with a collection of older gentlemen offering their remembrances of what life was like when being gay was illegal. It’s a style reminiscent of Switzerland’s excellent gay movie, The Circle (Der Kreis), which was also a proper film, but included contributions from real people involved in the world it was talking about. [Read more…]

Four Days (DVD Review) – Two young gay men inch towards a relationship

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Sometimes I watch a film and want to give everyone involved a pat on the back, while still thinking it’s not that great a movie. That’s the case with Four Days, which certainly has its heart in the right place, plenty of dedication and comes from a country which doesn’t have a huge track record of producing gay-themed movies, The Philippines. However, the results are a little underwhelming.

As the title suggests, the movie takes place over four days – four Valentine’s Days over four years. On the first day, Derek and Mark are both fairly new to being college roommates and are working out where they stand. Mark is particularly keen that Derek understands that if he’s put a sock on the door, it means he’s entertaining a woman and his roomie shouldn’t interrupt. [Read more…]

Their Finest (DVD Review) – Gemma Arterton turns Second World War screenwriter in a new Brit flick

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It’s 1940 and bombs are dropping on London. Catrin (Gemma Arterton) is a young Welsh woman who’s run away to the Capital with her artist lover. As a result, Catrin finds herself in need of a job, despite it being the middle of the Blitz. She unexpectedly finds work as a writer for a film company, which has been asked by the Ministry Of Information to make a movie that will help support the British war effort.

Catrin soon discovers that she’s still living in a man’s world, having to fight for respect from her colleague, Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin), and pretty much everyone else around her. After all, in Tom’s words she’s just there for the ‘slop’ – aka the female dialogue. [Read more…]