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

CINEMA REVIEWS

The latest cinema reviews from BGPS

Dark Shadows (Cinema)

By Leave a Comment

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

Dark Shadows has always been a somewhat problematic proposition for a film conversion, especially as it’s been brought to the screen by people who are obviously in love with the original US soap opera that ran between 1966 and 1971. The show ran for over 1,000 episodes and featured a vast array of characters and all sorts of different supernatural shenanigans. Those then needed to be distilled down to a single movie that’ll work for a generation who’ve never seen the show.

It’s a challenge that Dark Shadows only partially succeeds in, with the whole thing having the whiff of being filled things Johnny Depp and Tim Burton wanted to include, but which might have been better to have dispensed with. [Read more…]

Jeff, Who Lives At Home (Cinema)

By Leave a Comment

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

A film starring Jason Segel and Ed Helms should be hilarious, right? Plus it’s directed by Jay and Mark Duplass, the brothers who had indie success with the likes of The Puffy Chair and Baghead, and are now making their first properly mainstream movie (the underwhelming Cyrus doesn’t really count). Sadly the results are less than the sum of the parts, with the movie being infuriating in parts and only sporadically entertaining.

As the title suggests, Jeff (Jason Segel) lives at home. He’s in his mid-thirties, has no job, doesn’t leave his basement all that often and spends most of his time trying to work out the ‘signs’ he feels are all around him, which will tell him what his destiny is if only he can interpret them properly. His mother (Susan Sarandon) asks him to go out and get some wood glue, however when he receives a wrong phone call for somebody called Kevin, he sees this as a sign, which leads him to get distracted from his task and ends up following someone with the word ‘Kevin’ on his basketball vest. [Read more…]

Piggy (Cinema)

By Leave a Comment

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

Joe (Martin Compston) is a shy young man who seems somewhat scared of the grim London world around him. However his loving brother John (Neil Maskell) helps bring a sense of stability and happiness to his life, which is abruptly ended when John is savagely murdered.

Finding it difficult to come to terms with his loss, Joe is visited by an odd man called Piggy (Paul Anderson), who says he’s an old friend of his brother. Piggy is an avenger who knows the authorities aren’t going to do anything John death, and slowly works his way into Joe’s head, convincing him of the need to take direct action. Soon the two men are out on the streets looking for the five men responsible for John’s death. At first Joe finds it difficult to stomach the violence Piggy gets him involved in, but soon Joe get increasingly violent himself as his world begins to further unravel around him. [Read more…]

Angel & Tony (Cinema)

By Leave a Comment

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

This award winning, intense debut from French writer director Alix Delaporte, takes you on a journey of frustrated emotions, trust and hopefulness in adversity. Think Taming of the Shrew meets I’ve Loved You So Long.

The synopsis – Angel (Clotilde Hesme) is a stunning ex-con currently on probation and looking for a new life, Tony (Gregory Gadebois) is a homely fisherman living in solitude with his family who have suffered a recent bereavement. The two meet through a personal ad in the paper, Tony wants a wife whereas Angel seems very direct and thinks that sex will get her what she thinks she needs (which is very obvious from the opening scene, where she has sex with a young man to get a toy for her son!). [Read more…]

Avengers Assemble (Cinema)

By Leave a Comment

After years of build up, it’s finally here. While fanboys have long worried The Avengers (or Avengers Assemble as Disney wants us to call it in the UK, apparently because Brits are incapable of telling the difference between a 1960s TV show and a 2012 superhero movie) couldn’t live up to the hype, Joss Whedon has delivered.

It’s an action packed, rip-roaring juggernaut of a film, which pulls off the impressive trick of perfectly balancing a large ensemble cast, so that it feels as if everyone is there for a reason and has their own character arc. [Read more…]

Beauty (Skoonheid) (Cinema)

By Leave a Comment

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

Winner of the Queer Palm at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Beauty is one of those films on queer themes which stretches beyond just a gay audience. It’s a thought-provoking film full of tension, which will stay in your head long after the credits role.

Francois (Deon Lotz) is a middle-aged man living in South Africa. On the surface everything seems perfectly fine, although his marriage seems utterly devoid of any sign of affection. However his life is actually a morass of contradictions, so that he hates gay people, but goes off to retreats to have sex with others men (although actual gays and blacks are banned from these occasions). He seems to have everything pretty much under control though until he meets Christian (Charlie Keegan), the son of a long-lost friend. [Read more…]

The Divide (Cinema)

By Leave a Comment

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

I think it’s safe to say that if you want a nice, jolly couple of hours, The Divide probably isn’t the best movie to watch. It’s dark, relentlessly pessimistic, often unpleasant and more than a little depressing. It’s certainly not completely without merit, but it ain’t fun.

In the great, no fuss opening, a nuclear explosion is tearing through New York City and a group of random people race for the safety of a basement/slash bomb shelter. The owner of the basement, Mickey (Michael Biehn), doesn’t want them down there, but with radiation swirling above, he doesn’t have much choice. [Read more…]

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen (Cinema)

By Leave a Comment

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

Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) is a buttoned down man living a buttoned down life. He works as a scientist at the Department Of Agriculture & Fisheries, working on projects that will only be of interest to a tiny few fishermen and wishes nothing more than to be left alone to get on with his studies. Outside his job his marriage is stuck in a rut, where it feels like things have reached an end, but nobody wants to say it.

Things begin to chance when he’s forced to go to a meeting with Harriet (Emily Blunt), who looks after the UK holdings of a ridiculously wealthy sheikh (Amr Waked). The sheikh has a dream – to bring salmon fishing to the Yemen. Without spending any time thinking about it, Fred brands the project ludicrous and decides the sort of person who’d want to do must be incredibly selfish, putting their passions ahead of their people. [Read more…]

Battleship (Cinema)

By Leave a Comment

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

Just picture it – writer goes to see producer and says I have an idea for a movie, “Let’s base it on a game, say Battleship. We’ll make the enemy Aliens (Transformers style), set it in Pearl Harbor – with our allies being the Japanese, of all people – and let’s debut the worlds biggest pop star in her movie debut! You can think of it as Top Gun meets Independence Day!” Producer proceeds to mentally count the cash he thinks he’ll make.

This is basically the premise of one of the most anticipated films of the year – which to be honest isn’t a great state of affairs, if this is all Hollywood can deliver. That said, with an estimated budget of over $200M, you have to hope it’ll do better than last years’ two alien invasion efforts, Skyline and Battle Los Angeles. [Read more…]

Headhunters (Cinema)

By Leave a Comment

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

The antihero can be a difficult thing to pull off. If your protagonist is doing things that would normally be considered the province of the villain, you need to work extra hard to make the audience empathise with them or see them as heroic. You can get round it with something like someone’s family being attacked so they have a reason to go out for revenge, but what if your ‘hero’ is actually a bit of an asshole?

That’s what we have in Headhunters, but it actually manages to make it work, which is no small achievement. [Read more…]