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 Skeleton Twins (DVD Review)

By Leave a Comment

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

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…]

Horns (DVD Review)

By Leave a Comment

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

Horns is a certainly a bit of an odd film, not least because it can’t quite decide what it is – comedy, horror, fable, fantasy, thriller, murder mystery, drama – flitting between them all with little sense of consistency. It’s probably this difficulty in pigeonholing the movie that has limited its audience so far, but in many ways that’s a shame, as while very uneven it is oddly entertaining and just a little beguiling.

Daniel Radcliffe is Ig Perrish, whose girlfriend (Juno Temple) has been murdered and everyone in his small town has decided he’s the killer, despite there not being enough evidence to charge him with anything. Things get a little bizarre when he wakes up one morning to discover he’s grown horns out of his forehead, and that he now has the power to get people to admit to all the things they’d normally keep hidden away (he discovers a lot of these things involve what they’d really like to do to him, as they believe he’s gotten away with murder). [Read more…]

Mommy (Cinema Review)

By Leave a Comment

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

Just when you think you’ve had enough of well-meaning films featuring disabilities and heroic struggles along comes one that completely restores your faith. Queer filmmaker Xavier Dolan’s film is a tour de force, an emotional power-punch that slowly makes its way into your head and then into your heart. It may deal with a lot of clichés but finds a winning way to tell its story.

Anne Dorval is Die, a handsome but tired-looking woman who has lost her husband three years ago and is now stuck with looking after her son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon). He has severe ADHD, a problem when he is such a strapping lad on the brink of discovering sex, and he loves a drink, a smoke and a fight. Die rescues him from an institution where he has apparently started a fire, and she determines to make a new life for them both. But boy, is he a handful, constantly swearing, eyeing up girls and unable to sit still to study. [Read more…]

Kissing Darkness (DVD Review)

By Leave a Comment

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

Vampires have always been a little bit gay, but Kissing Darkness wants to take that further with a film that comes across as if Twilight had been made in the style of a gay porn movie – except without the hardcore sex.

A group of gay friends (plus a token straight guy) head off for a weekend at a remote cabin. However their fun time isn’t just spoiled by tensions amongst them, but by a strange spirit they awaken after messing with a Ouija board. The ‘witch’ seems to have a problem with the gays, and works her way through the group, turning them into bloodthirsty vampires who do her bidding. [Read more…]

Continuum (DVD Review)

By Leave a Comment

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

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…]

Pride (Blu-ray Review)

By Leave a Comment

For many people Pride was one of the best films of 2014, if not the best. It’s well made, genuinely funny, angry, smart and heartfelt; and while tinged with tragedy, overall it’s astonishingly uplifting.

It’s the early 1980s and the National Union Of Miners is on strike due to theThatcher government’s decision to close a number of coal pits. The strike is dragging on and the nation is divided, including in London where a group of gays and lesbians decide to come together to raise cash for the miners. There’s a problem though, as when they try to donate the cash they find out that the Union and various other groups don’t want to take the money as they’d preferred not to be associated with a bunch of ‘poofs’. Although LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) could donate anonymously, de facto group leader Mark (Ben Schnetzer) is determined that gay people raised the cash and they should be able to donate without hiding their sexuality. [Read more…]

Appropriate Behavior (Cinema Review)

By Leave a Comment

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

Appropriate Behavior is a proper audience divider. Desiree Akhavan’s Shirin is narcissistic, self-obsessed and shallow, but convinced she’s deep, complex and misunderstood. However, how you take the film depends on how self-aware you think it is. Is it on Shirin’s side and lauding the life of the tragically hip, or is it well aware of her shortcomings and essentially satirising it?

I’d safely say it’s the latter, but I can see why have assumed the former, as the film’s humour is dry as a bone and so it’s not too shocking some viewers have missed it. [Read more…]

Playing It Cool (VoD Review)

By Leave a Comment

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

It’s not often that a movie with this much star power doesn’t get a cinema release in the UK, but Playing It Cool has gone straight to VoD, despite the presence of Chris Evans, Michelle Monaghan, Topher Grace, Aubrey Plaza, Luke Wilson, Patrick Warbuton, Matthew Morrison, Ioan Gruffudd, Ashley Tisdale, Anthony Mackie and Phillip Baker Hall, amongst others.

So is there something wrong with it? Well, there’s nothing really bad, but its problem is that it has a lot of ambition but doesn’t quite hit any of its marks. Even so it’s a surprise it hasn’t been in cinemas.

Chris Evans plays a screenwriter who has little interest in the romantic comedy script he’s been commissioned to write, largely because he’s not a big believer in love. With every relationship he’s had, he’s ended up telling the woman he doesn’t feel the same way she does, and he’s now essentially trying to avoid the whole thing. But then he meets Michelle Monaghan, and there’s definitely a connection. [Read more…]

Love, Rosie (Blu-ray Review)

By Leave a Comment

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

It’s interesting to see sometimes how different critic and audience reactions can be. Love, Rosie currently has a very good 7.4/10 rating on IMDB from audience votes, but an abysmal 21% on RottenTomatoes from critics.

When you watch the film you can understand the disparity. If you’re a movie aficionado the whole thing is rather tedious – it’s by-the-numbers  to the point of feeling like it was just spewed out of a machine. The characters we’ve seen 10,000 times before and while the idea of exploring whether people who’ve been friends since childhood can become a successful adult couple has potential, it’s handled in a way that’s doesn’t have a vaguely original idea. All that is anathema to critics but many audience members like it – after all it’s why places like McDonald’s are so successful, you know exactly what you’re going to get and there’s comfort in that, even if gourmands may hate it. [Read more…]

Nightcrawler (Blu-ray Review)

By Leave a Comment

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

I’m not entirely sure why Jake Gyllenhaal felt the need to lose loads of weight for Nightcrawler, but conbined with a very good performance he certainly looks the part of a man who’s one step away from being a psychopath – and maybe not even one step.

He is Louis Bloom, who’s certainly not lacking in confidence and believes he’s got everything to offer the world, but his life and career is going nowhere, partly because he lacks direction and also because he had no issue being on the edge of the law. However he stumbles into a career he never expected when he meets a Nightcrawler – freelance cameramen who race to emergencies in the hope of getting sensationalist footage for the local news. [Read more…]