April 9th Archives - Big Gay Picture Show

Switch (DVD)

April 10, 2012 By Tim Isaac Leave a Comment

Starring: Karine Vanasse, Eric Cantona, Mehdi Nebbou
Director: Frederic Schoendoerffer
Running Time: 99 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: April 9th, 2012

Sophie Malaterre (Karine Vanasse) is excited by the idea of a house swap – where you exchange homes with someone so you both get a holiday but save on accommodation – which will allow her to escape her Montreal life for a while with a trip to Paris. However she hasn’t been in France for long when the police raid the flat she’s swapped into and arrest Sophie while she’s in the bath, carting her off to the station after a decapitated head is found in her room. [Read more…]

Jitters (DVD)

April 9, 2012 By Tim Isaac Leave a Comment

Starring: Atli Oskar Fjalarsson, Hreindis Ylva Garoarsdottir, Gisli Orn Garoarsson
Director: Baldvin Zophoniasson
Running Time: 93 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: April 9th, 2012

We don’t get to see a lot of Icelandic movies, partly because as a nation of just over 300,000 people, they don’t exactly produce an endless stream of films of international calibre. However Iceland does make a few films each year and every so often something emerges from the country that deserves a wider audience. Jitters is one of them, a kind of Icelandic Skins, centring on a boy coming to terms with being gay, while his friends have their own issues with teenage life.

Rather than Iceland, the opening of the movie takes place in the UK, where young Gabriel (Atli Oskar Fjalarsson) is on a three week trip to Britain. He shares a room with Markus (Haraldur Ari Stefansson) and on the last night they share a kiss. Once back in Iceland, Gabriel hopes there will be more, but Markus treats it very much as if it never happened. [Read more…]

Texas Killing Fields (DVD)

April 9, 2012 By Tim Isaac Leave a Comment

Starring: Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jessica Chastain, Chloe Moretz
Director: Ami Canaan Mann
Running Time: 100 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: April 9th, 2012

Based loosely on a true story, Mike Sounder (Sam Worthington) and Brian Heigh (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) play two cops investigating crime in the Texas bayous. Heigh becomes increasingly drawn to a series of murders where the bodies of the victims are dumped in an area that’s become known as The Killing Fields. Local guy Souder warns New York transplant Heigh against getting too deep into the investigation, partly because it’s outside their jurisdiction and partly because he knows it’s dangerous and you can get lost in trying to make sense of what’s going on.

However Heigh can’t give up and soon attracts the attention of the killer, who starts to seem as if he’s taunting the police with red herring clues. Then a local girl goes missing and the stakes are raised. [Read more…]

Absent (Ausent) (DVD)

April 7, 2012 By Tim Isaac Leave a Comment

Starring: Carlos Echevarría, Javier De Pietro, Antonella Costa
Director: Marco Berger
Running Time: 86 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: April 9th, 2012

Winner of the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival – a gong given to the best movie on LGBT themes – Absent comes to DVD fresh from a centrepiece screening at the recent London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in March.

The film is about a teenage boy, Martin (Javier De Pietro), who pretends to have something wrong with his eye so that his teacher, Sebastian, has to take him to the hospital. When they’ve finished with the doctor, Martin comes up with a convoluted story about having arranged to stay the night with a friend that they can’t get in touch with and then gives reasons why he can’t go home. Unsure what to do, the teacher decides to take him back to his apartment and let him stay the night. It’s clear though the student has ulterior motives, being somewhat flirtatious and touching Sebastian’s leg while he sleeps. [Read more…]

Die Hard Quadrilogy (Blu-ray)

April 6, 2012 By Tim Isaac Leave a Comment

Starring: Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedelia, Alan Rickman, Justin Long, Jeremy Irons
Director: John McTiernan, Renny Harlin, Len Wiseman
Running Time: 503 mins
Certificate: 18
Release Date: April 9th, 2012

There’s a slightly awkward situation with the Die Hard movies in the UK, where the distribution rights for parts 1, 2 and 4 are owned by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, while Die Hard With A Vengeance is released by Disney (or at least Buena Vista). As a result, getting a box set release of all the movies is a trickier proposition than you’d expect, as you have to get different studios to accept it, and so it’s only now that Fox can bring out a Blu-ray box set containing all four movies, replacing the previous Die Hard Blu-ray set, which lacked part 3!

You’ve undoubtedly seen all four films (and if you haven’t, what are you doing on a film website, reading a review of a Die Hard box set?), but just in case you haven’t, the series follows the exploits of Bruce Willis John McLane, the archetypal right man in the wrong place at the wrong time. [Read more…]