LGBT+
Stranger by the LakeThursday, 20 February 2014
The lakeside beach that is the only scene of action in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake is a concentrated crucible of desires. The sense of languid summer and the limpid beauty of the lake itself, beautifully and compellingly caught throughout... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Stranger by the LakeMonday, 17 February 2014
Stranger by the Lake is something of a wonder, a superbly made amalgam of Hitchcockian psychological thriller and explicit homoerotica, whose very presence in commercial cinemas defies convention. Yet the sheer quality of Frenchman Alain Guiraudie’s... Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: The Circle, Love Is Strange, Land of Storms, Praia do FuturoSunday, 16 February 2014
Back in the 1950s the Zurich underground club Der Kreis was a rare beacon of tolerance of homosexuality in Europe. Fitting then that Swiss director Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary of the same name, The Circle (****), won this year’s Teddy award at... Read more... |
DVD: In the Name ofMonday, 10 February 2014
Gay cinema in Poland is emerging slowly, for understandable reasons, which makes Malgoska Szumowska’s accomplished, if somewhat traditional drama In the Name of something of a ground-breaker. Not least because its story is centred around the country... Read more... |
Dallas Buyers ClubWednesday, 05 February 2014
Extreme physical transformation is a double-edged sword for actors. Setting aside the metabolic repercussions of shedding huge amounts of weight from an already lean frame, as Matthew McConaughey did for the role of rodeo cowboy and accidental... Read more... |
Looking, Sky AtlanticTuesday, 28 January 2014
“If I didn’t want to have a life, I’d move to LA,” was one of the (many) funny lines in the new HBO series Looking, and brought home that, along with the show’s three appealing gay male leads (main picture), it’s the city of San Francisco itself... Read more... |
Exposed: Beyond BurlesqueFriday, 10 January 2014
There’s a wealth of stories in Exposed: Beyond Burlesque, a highly articulate, visually flamboyant and finally moving documentary journey around the wilder edges of the performance genre. Director Beth B, a veteran of New York’s experimental film... Read more... |
Queer as Pop, Channel 4 / The Joy of Abba, BBC FourSaturday, 28 December 2013
Queer as Pop (****) was as much about social as musical history, and Nick Vaughan-Smith’s film told its story with a combination of outstanding archive material and some incisive interviewees, the archive taking fractionally more of the weight.... Read more... |
CD: Erasure - Snow GlobeSaturday, 14 December 2013
There's something about the partnership of Vince Clarke and Andy Bell that seems to automatically generate sweetness. This collection of half originals and half Christmas classics is really quite dark, quite a bitter look at winter and the Christmas... Read more... |
Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves, BBC FourTuesday, 03 December 2013
The bleak opening of Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves is set in a nursing home where a man is dying of AIDS, tended by nurses who themselves know next to nothing of the disease. The phrase one nurse utters as a warning gives this Swedish drama... Read more... |
Blue Is the Warmest ColourWednesday, 20 November 2013
“The most potent special effect in movies is the human face changing its mind.” So stated film critic David Thomson, and the principle has never been more irrefutably proven than by Blue Is the Warmest Colour and its leading lady Adèle Exarchopoulos... Read more... |
How To Survive A PlagueThursday, 07 November 2013
What happens when a citizenry marginalised by society and weakened by an illness that could well be fatal are also called upon to rise up to demand the treatment, not to mention the civility and compassion, that are their due? The answer is on often... Read more... |
