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

La La Land (Blu-ray Review) – Should it have won the Best Picture Oscar for more than 90 seconds?

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It’s the film that won the Best Picture Oscar for a whole 90 seconds, before the Academy managed to says, ‘Whoops, sorry, it was actually Moonlight’. However, it did pick up six of film world’s most prestigious gongs, including Best Actress for Emma Stone, and Best Director for Damien Chazelle. It was also the favourite for the biggest prize going into the ceremony, having charmed audiences with its tale of two people trying to find both love and artistic success.

In LA, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a jazz musician, working a dead-end job playing piano in a bar, but desperate to prove himself as a real force in a music form that many others have given up on. Mia (the brilliant Emma Stone) is a young woman who works as a waitress, but she also goes to a succession of auditions for movie and TV roles in the hope of finding success as an actress. [Read more…]

Manchester By The Sea (Blu-ray Review) – Inside broken lives doing their best in the Oscar-winning film

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Despite allegations of past sexual assault swirling around Casey Affleck, he picked up the Best Actor Oscar for Manchester By The Sea, with Kenneth Lonergan also winning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Judging purely from what’s on the screen, you can see why they won, as Affleck puts in an extremely good performance, working from a nicely nuanced script which prizes emotion but tries to avoid cliché.

Affleck is Lee Chandler, who’s working as a janitor in Boston. He drinks too much, barely socialises and gets in trouble for being rude to tenants. He gets a call to say that his brother has died and so he heads to his hometown of Manchester, Massachusetts. Lee also knows he’ll have to help look after his teenage nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges) but isn’t prepared for that fact his brother has named him as Patrick’s guardian, something he doesn’t feel vaguely able to handle. [Read more…]

Assassin’s Creed (DVD Review) – Michael Fassbender brings the videogame to life

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After witnessing the aftermath of his mother’s murder as a child, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) has been on the run and fighting to survive, something that’s left him on death row. After his ‘execution’, he wakes up in a strange facility. The people who run it, led by Sofia (Marion Cotillard), have gotten hold of him because they want to awaken the ‘genetic memories’ he holds, which they can access through a machine called the Animus.

Once attached the contraption, he relives events that took place 500 years ago involving his ancestor, Aguilar de Nerha, who was part of The Assassins, a secret group fighting to stop the Templars taken over Christendom and ruling it with an iron fist. That involves a search for the Apple of Eden, where man’s freewill comes from. [Read more…]