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

REVIEWS

Cinema, DVD and Blu-ray reviews

Beauty (Skoonheid) (Cinema)

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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…]

Lifeboat (Blu-ray)

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Lifeboat is one of those movies a lot of people have heard about, but relatively few have seen. While it came before most of Hitchcock’s most famous movies – although after his Best Picture Oscar-winning Rebecca – it’s a classic that’s worth visiting. After a German U-boat torpedoes an allied ship, a group of disparate survivors gather on a lifeboat. Told completely from within the confines of the boat, the men and women aboard realise their predicament is a hairy one and that their best chance of survival is to make for Bermuda.

The problem is that none of them know where Bermuda is. However there’s one person on board who does appear to be able to navigate, a German U-boat survivor who might have been the captain of the vessel. But can they trust him? [Read more…]

The Divide (Cinema)

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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…]

Tash Force (DVD)

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Tash McDermott (Mark Woodward) is the head of Lancashire Constabulary’s Football Intelligence Unit, who’s dedicated to preventing hooliganism. He agrees to allow a documentary crew to follow him around, showing off what he believes is his great skill, but what the world can see as his bungling incompetence.

He’s on the trail of the elusive football firm bad guy Nightmare, but it’s going to be tough to find him, especially as Tash has taken programmes like The Sweeney to heart and seems incapable of moving towards a more modern style of policing, much to the chagrin of his superiors. [Read more…]

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen (Cinema)

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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…]

Dream House (DVD)

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If you read a lot of the reviews of Dream House on its cinema release, you might be expecting the film to be an absolute stinker. Pretty much disowned by its cast and director, and pilloried by the critics, the film’s not had a lot of luck. However, while it’s certainly not a great thriller, it’s a lot better than you might expect.

Daniel Craig plays Will Atenton, who moves into a seemingly idyllic small-town home with his wife (Rachel Weisz) and two daughters. However their apparently perfect new life begins to fracture when they discover their house was the site of a family massacre five years before. Teens hold séances in the basement and there are rumours that the killer may have returned. And then there’s the next door neighbour, Ann (Naomi Watts), who appears to know more than she’s letting on to. [Read more…]

Acts Of Godfrey (DVD)

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Not many movies open with a man standing in a hotel car park in the pouring rain, absolutely butt naked. However the opening shots of Acts Of Godfrey are a hint right from the beginning that this isn’t the sort of movie that’s going to do things by the book.

However what really marks it out isn’t its penchant for car park nudity but that the whole thing is written and performed in rhyming couplets. Indeed you get the impression that it was the chance to make a film in modern verse that attracted the likes of Simon Callow, Harry Enfield, Celia Imrie and Doon Mackichan. [Read more…]

Romantics Anonymous (DVD)

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When Romantics Anonymous opened with a scene featuring lead character Angelique (Isabelle Carre) falling into a dead faint at the eponymous support group for the overly quixotic, I almost switched the DVD off. It wasn’t because there was anything wrong with this particular sequence, but I wasn’t sure I could physically take yet another film where a quirky yet loveable misfit manages to find an equally out of place love interest to complement them.  It seems to be the plot for every other indie or foreign movie out there at the moment, and to be frank, I didn’t think I could take another one!

However I had to write a review and so I persevered, and I’m glad I did. [Read more…]

The Doom Generation (DVD)

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The second part of Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy – after Totally F***ed Up and before Nowhere – The Doom Generation holds a special place as one of the few films that truly helps define mid-90s indie cinema. It’s a movie that feeds off Generation X nihilism and the anger of post-punk youth to create a road trip film that feels both meaningful and pointless at the same time.

Amy (Rose McGowan) and her slightly dim boyfriend Jordan (James Duval) are out one night when their paths cross that of drifter Xavier (Johnathan Schaech). While Amy at first wants nothing to do with him, a strange bond develops after Xavier saves her life by literally shooting a gun-toting shop owner’s head off. [Read more…]

Griff The Invisible (DVD)

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Superheroes in the real world are quite popular at the moment, with Griff The Invisible being Australia’s entry. True Blood’s Ryan Kwanten stars as Griff, a meek, quiet man trapped in a dull office job by day, but by night he hits the streets as a costumed hero.

Griff is fascinated by the possibility of becoming invisible (literally rather than just metaphorically, which is how he is for most of his life), and is hard at work on a suit he hopes will make him completely see-through. [Read more…]