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

Three In A Bed (DVD Review)

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Nate is a young man whose life has slightly stalled. On her deathbed his mother made him promise to look after his two sisters, something he took to heart so much that he doesn’t have much going on of his own. It doesn’t help that his sisters are loud, gobby and good at getting into trouble.

But then he meets Jonny, who lives downstairs and seems keen to make friends. They certainly share an attraction, but Nate isn’t sure what his sexuality is, and his life suddenly becomes more complicated when his sisters – who are certain he’s straight – announce that because of the various issues in their lives, they’re coming to stay with him. Nate flirts around the idea of starting something up with Jonny, although Jonny isn’t keen on the idea of having to keep the whole thing in the closet. [Read more…]

Paddington (Blu-ray Review)

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Paddington is proof, if it were needed, that in a world where filmmakers constantly seem to think they need to make their family films cool and hip, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel if you’re going to do it right.

I have to admit I was dubious about this take on Michael Bond’s classic children’s character, as after seeing the first image of the bear’s new live-action/CGI incarnation, he just didn’t look quite right to me. However after only a couple of minutes of the movie starting, I have to admit I was rather enchanted. [Read more…]

The Skeleton Twins (DVD Review)

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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)

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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…]

I Am Michael (BFI Flare Opening Night Film Review)

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Chosen as the Opening Night Gala film for this year’s BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival, this is an angry-making film. It’s supposed to be as it’s probably the first Going In movie, in that it’s a reversed Coming Out tale: I am Michael tells the story of how Michael Glatze went from out gay activist and editor of San Fransisco-based gay magazine XY to a straight, married Pastor in Wyoming.

The film opens with James Franco as Michael and Zachary Quinto as his loving-yet-bland boyfriend Bennet. Apparently they’re happily in love in San Francisco, both running a gay magazine and helping gay youth in 2001. We watch as Bennett and Michael go from being happy together to being happy in a three-way relationship with Tyler (played by the ab-tastic Charlie Carver). At least, we assume they’re happy together – at no point does anyone say “I am happy being gay with you”, which is about the level of some of the exposition this script has in places. Michael is moody. Bennett is bland. Tyler is pretty. That’s about it. [Read more…]

Mommy (Cinema Review)

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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…]

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (Blu-ray Review)

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Mockingjay was always going to have a struggle, despite the success of the previous movies. Anyone who’s read the books will know that the third instalment is rather different from the earlier two, not least because there’s no Hunger Games arena and things get pretty dark and glum. Many also wondered whether there was enough material to make two films out of it, or if this gambit to get more cash from the Panem cow was a stretch too far.

It’s pleasing to see then that Mockingjay Part 1 is pretty good. Quite how good it is is difficult to say at the moment, as it’s tough to escape the feeling that this is a long build-up to Part 2, and it’s only going to be with the hindsight of the final instalment that we’ll really be able to properly judge. [Read more…]

Kissing Darkness (DVD Review)

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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…]

The Imitation Game (Blu-ray Review)

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Despite eight Oscar nominations The Imitation Game only walked away with one award, Best Adapted Screenplay. To be honest that wasn’t a shock, as quite a few Oscar watchers had thought it would get nothing. And there are also some, including myself, wondering if the one Academy Award it did win was the right one.

The movie tells the story of Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), a socially awkward, somewhat irascible mathematics prodigy who, after the Second World War breaks out, applies to the government to help break the infamous Enigma code, something many believe is impossible. However he doesn’t want to continue with the traditional method of codebreaking, where smart men use pens, paper and just their brains, as he has an idea to use a machine to break down and then check the billions of possible combinations until it finds the right one. If he can do it, it will allow the Allies to read the German military’s secret communications and possibly win the war. [Read more…]

Continuum (DVD Review)

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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…]