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

The Maze Runner (Blu-ray Review)

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After the success of The Hunger Games it’s not too surprising that Hollywood rushed to put similarly themed movies into production, such as Divergent and now The Maze Runner.  While nearly all the knock-offs of Twilight, and indeed Harry Potter, were pretty rubbish, The Maze Runner isn’t bad at all.

Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) wakes up in a metal cage that’s rising out of the ground. He has no idea who he is or how he got there but finds himself thrust into the strange world of The Glade, where every month for three years a new young man has arrived, also with no idea what they’re doing there. A society led by Gally (Will Poulter) has arisen, bound by rules supposed to keep them alive. [Read more…]

The Best Of Me (DVD Review)

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Have you ever had the sensation where you weren’t sure whether to be emotionally moved or whether to vomit? Well, I do now after watching The Best of Me.

After surviving an oil rig disaster, Dawson (James Marsden) gets a call to say that an old friend of his has died and he needs to travel back to his hometown to help sort things out. When he arrives he discovers he’s not the only one who got a call, as so did Amanda (Michelle Monaghan), a woman who has a history with Dawson and isn’t initially pleased to see him. [Read more…]

The Rewrite (DVD Review)

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In The Rewrite Hugh Grant is Keith Michaels, a man who several years ago won a Best Screenplay Oscar. However his last few films have flopped and he’s lost his way. He agrees to teach screenwriting at an East Coast college, where he intends to do as little work as possible. However the college has other ideas, forcing him to actually engage with his students.

Keith finds himself getting closer to a single mother in his class, Holly (Marisa Tomei), whose plain-spoken wisdom cuts through all of his Hollywood bull. Despite his initial disdain for the whole idea of teaching, Keith begins to find value in what he’s doing. [Read more…]

Erebus: Into The Unknown (DVD Review)

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Many of the best documentaries are based around incredible stories that few people know much about, and that’s certainly true here. The docudrama Erebus: Into The Unknown heads back to 1979, when an airplane taking 257 passengers on a sightseeing tour of Antarctica mysteriously crashed into the remote and frozen Mount Erebus.

In order to recover the victims, 11 New Zealand police officers – none of whom had much experience with snow or survival situations – were sent to Antarctica and onto Erebus, to deal with the horrific job of finding, cataloguing and recovering the now totally frozen bodies. [Read more…]

Mood Indigo (Blu-ray Review)

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As a film reviewer it feels almost compulsory to believe that a director’s original cut is the one we ought to watch, but in some cases that’s not true.

Mood Indigo was released in France back in early 2013 with a very lengthy running time of 131 minutes. However despite having Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine, Be Kind Rewind) at the helm and talents such as Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou and Omar Sy starring, it took over a year for it to arrive in the US and UK, and when it did, it was 40 minutes shorter.

At the time, many harrumphed about the idea of philistine producers neutering Gondry’s original intentions, but the home entertainment release gives us a chance to see both versions side by side and it turns out that what we got was better than original edition the French had. [Read more…]

The Day The Earth Caught Fire (Blu-ray Review)

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The BFI has been busy once more restoring a piece of cult cinema from Britain’s past, this time 1961’s slice of sci-fi, The Day The Earth Caught Fire, from Quatermass director Val Guest. Like the best of science fiction from that era, it’s a movie that’s not just about made-up nonsense, but takes on things such as the changes in sexual politics and most particularly fear of the nuclear bomb.

Like everyone else, Daily Express journalist Peter Stenning (Edward Judd) can’t help but notice that strange things are happening with the weather, such as an unexpected solar eclipse and weird, dense fog blanketing London. After getting off to a rocky start with civil servant Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro), they embark on a affair, and thanks to her Stenning gets a tip that the weather isn’t just an anomaly. The US and Russia simultaneously exploding nuclear bombs has knocked the planet off its axis and may also have sent it out of orbit and getting ever closer to the sun. [Read more…]

Transformers: Age Of Extinction (Blu-ray Review)

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Reviewing Transformers: Age Of Extinction seems slightly pointless. It has an abysmal 18% rating on RottenTomatoes, with only 32 out of 178 that collated reviews saying it’s a decent movie. Despite that it’s currently the highest grossing movie of 2014 worldwide with over $1 billion in the bank (largely thanks to a gargantuan gross in China). So whether anyone says it’s good or bad seems a little irrelevant.

But just for the record, it’s not a good movie. [Read more…]

Godzilla (Blu-ray Review)

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After the disaster that was Roland Emmerich’s dreadful 1998 take on Godzilla you might have thought Hollywood would never touch the property again. However the massive monster has returned in a movie that sticks closer to the original Japanese Toho ideas than Emmerich’s efforts, and yet is still very much a modern blockbuster.

While working at a Japanese Nuclear Reactor in the late 1990s, Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) lost his wife (Juliette Binoche) during a meltdown. However he’s never believed it was caused by an earthquake and has become obsessed with the idea that something is being hidden in the supposed disaster area. After recruiting his estranged son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), they venture into the hot zone and discover that not only is there no radiation, but that an organisation called Monarch is hiding a pupating monster. [Read more…]

Walking On Sunshine (DVD Review)

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The musical Walking On Sunshine is undoubtedly a bizarre proposition. There’s virtually no part of it that doesn’t seem ill-judged and pretty bizarre, yet after 90 minutes of what feels like someone screaming in your face ‘HAVE A NICE TIME!’, it’s difficult not to succumb to a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome and submit (while hating yourself for it).

Walking On Sunshine was always going to have a difficult time from the moment that it decided that it was going to have as little plot as possible, but what it would have would revolve you hoping that one sister would be able to steal the other’s fiancé before the credits roll. That’s a tough sell in a drama, let alone a movie that’s essentially an excuse to string together a series of 80s pop songs. [Read more…]

Cilla (DVD Review)

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We don’t see Cilla Black too much anymore since she entered semi-retirement. However anyone who was around in the UK in the 1980s will know her from shows such as Blind Date and Surprise Surprise, and they may also remember that before she was a TV host she was a singer. However only those who can recall the heyday of the Beatles are likely to know much about that part of her story.

The three-part mini-series Cilla takes us back to the days when she was Cilla White (Sheridan Smith), a rock ‘n’ roll obsessed Liverpudlian teenager, who was friends with a pre-Beatles Ringo Starr, headed down to The Cavern Club whenever she got the chance and had parents who were proud that she was the first member of the family deemed good enough for office work. [Read more…]