This award-winning and Sundance Festival-selected film is an intricate look at the lives of two men who enter into a relationship in 90s New York.
Erik is a Danish documentary film-maker who meets Paul via a telephone chat-line. Erik is anxious about commitment and lawyer Paul has a steady girlfriend. What starts off as a casual sexual relationship develops into something more meaningful and romantic. The film charts the two lovers throughout their turbulent ten-year relationship.
The two main characters’ lives take on unexpected turns and as Erik becomes more responsible and committed, Paul’s more orderly life spirals out of control as his recreational drug abuse becomes a destructive habit. The relationship enters a series of cycles of damage and renewal as the film charts their lives.
The film is beautiful to watch but also painful to view in places, but ultimately provides a meaningful glimpse into the areas of both lightness and shade which relationships can pass through. The balance of the film is such that the story never feels too bleak but is balanced with erotic tension, a compelling storyline and occasional bursts of humour. Strong performances from the cast add to the emotional intensity of the film.
Highly recommended for a moving and fascinating insight into the life cycle of a relationship.
Cocoon is a true depiction of the trials and triumphs of female adolescence, a coming-of-age tale that every woman can relate to.
In the heat of a shimmering Berlin summer, Nora (Lena Urzendowsky) spends her days as a third wheel to her older sister Jule (Lena Klenke) and her best friend Aylin (Elina Vildanova). They think and talk only of boys and how to keep thin, whilst wandering the vibrant city streets taking selfies and juvenile social media videos. Feeling the pressures to fit in, Nora goes along with her sister’s frolics – drinking, smoking and playing ‘smack the finger’ with the boys. But with their alcoholic mother largely absent, it is Jule who bears the brunt of Nora’s supervision. Nora looks up to Jule but still keeps and cares for caterpillars, an activity she and her mother once shared.
On a gym day at school, Nora gets her period for the first time in front of the class – one embarrassing step too far for Jule. When older student Romy rushes to Nora’s rescue, a friendship blossoms and Nora falls fast in love for the first time. But as the hottest summer on record comes to a close, things will never be the same for Nora – the butterfly has emerged from her cocoon.
Set in 1970’s and 1980’s Sri Lanka, and adapted from Shyam Selvadurai’s critically acclaimed novel of the same name, Funny Boy is a coming-of-age film of a young boys exploration of his identity and set against the backdrop of 1980’s Sri Lankan Civil War.
Arjie (Arush Nand) lives with his wealthy family in a beautiful home and very close to his large extended family. He doesn’t want to play soccer with the other boys, including his brother – he actually wants to dress up in colourful clothes and hang out with his cool aunt Rahda (Agam Darshi). But Arjie’s parents know he is different, but as Arjie gets older (played by Brandon Ingram), there is no denying that Arjie is gay. He even becomes best friends with, and then falls in love with a fellow male classmate. And when his family catches them in the act, they feel that Arjie has disgraced them, And it’s especially more daunting is that his boyfriend is Sinhalese, while Arjie and his family are Tamil. This is all set against instability and unrest in Sri Lanka, and at a time when homosexuality there was illegal (it still remains as an offence in the country’s books). Arjie suffers because of who he is and who he loves.
Funny Boy is such a lovely film. We would like for more films just like this, please.
Written by Deepa Mehta and Shyam Selvadurai, the film stars Brandon Ingram, Nimmi Harasgama, Agam Darshi, Ali Kazmi, Seema Biswas, and Arush Nand.
Funny Boy is Canada’s official entry for the 93rd Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category.
Now playing in the UK and Ireland also available on Netflix.
Henry Blake, in his debut as director and writer, gives us an intimate and moving portrait of a young man groomed into the drug trade.
In County Lines, we meet Tyler (Conrad Khan), who lives at home with his single mother Toni (a very good Ashley Madekwe) and his little sister Briony (Shauna Sim). Tyler is a disaffected youth in east London, and at 14 is the man of the house. His mother has a hard time making ends meet, and also has a hard time getting Tyler to open up. Tyler is just going through the motions at school, couldn’t care either way about it, nor about the men his mom brings home. But one day he meets the good-looking and sharp-dressed Simon (Harris Dickinson).
Simon offers Tyler the opportunity to make money, money much needed in his cash strapped home to pay the bills. Soon enough, Tyler gets sucked into the world of drug-running – delivering drugs and collecting money – but it all comes at a risk, not just from the authorities but from other dealers in the business as well. But Tyler gets in way too deep, but will the new trainers and extra money be worth the risk?
Khan is just about perfect as the young man who wants to do right by his family and takes an opportunity he sees as too good to be true. Khan, a veteran of many films, including The Huntsman and The Passenger, has an amazingly expressive face. Madekwe also just about perfect as his struggling mom, while Dickinson (Beach Rats) is good as always. Director Blake pulls us into Tyler’s bleak world from the start – it’s an amazing debut from Blake – who originally created this film as a short – nominated for the Best British Short Film Award at the London Short Film Festival last year.
Fionn O’Shea and Lola Petticrew are just about perfect as a young couple who pretend to fall in love in1995 Ireland in the new film Dating Amber.
But they are not an actual couple. You see Eddie (O’Shea) is Gay (though he won’t admit it), and Amber (Petticrew) is a Lesbian, and both are on the cusp of finishing their last year of high school. Amber, who lives with her widowed mother in a trailer park, has dreams of moving to London after she graduates. Eddie, meanwhile, plans to go into the military to follow in his father’s footsteps. But to survive their final year at school, and to ward off name-calling and bullying from their fellow students, they decide to pretend to be a couple (this is after a failed attempt on Eddie’s part to woo a blond girl, though he fails to grab her boob during a groping session).
Eddie and Amber go through their charade and actually make a perfect couple; Eddie is shy, very cute and adorable, while Amber is aggressive, knows what she wants, and has all the best lines. However, after a night out to a gay bar in Dublin where Amber meets someone, and Eddie still not quite ready to accept that he’s gay, the pressure is on for him to take charge of his life, to appease his father (Barry Ward) and very understanding and knowing mother (Sharon Horgan), alongside his know-it-all younger brother (Evan O’Connor).
This coming-of-age comedy is a poignant, honest and funny look at the highs and lows of teenage life while growing up in a conservative environment where young people who are different don’t seem to fit in. Both leads are just absolutely perfect, the feel of mid-90s Ireland comes through the screen, and the funny script makes Dating Amber the one of best romantic comedy and growing up films of the year.
Eva Green is superb as a divorced single mother who is an astronaut chosen to go into space in the excellent Proxima.
Sarah (Green) is a French astronaut training at the European Space Agency in Cologne and lives alone with her seven-year-old daughter Stella (Zélie Boulant), and still friendly with her ex-husband Thomas (Lars Eidinger).
Being the only woman in the space program, Sarah is chosen to be part of the crew for a year-long space mission called ‘Proxima.’ While she is honoured and privileged to be chosen, she must weigh the fact that this will take her away from her delicate daughter for a year, and this also means putting Sarah in the middle of a male-only mission where there is very little sympathy for her being a woman and a mother. She has to put up with misogynistic banter, and fellow crew members who need to more time to get used to going up into space with a woman. Even the captain Mike (a very good Matt Dillon) doesn’t immediately take a liking to her. But Sarah slowly earns the respect of the crew and slowly prepares Stella for her departure. But second thoughts enter Sarah’s head, and right up to the last minute she has her doubts.
Proxima premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and proceeded to run the festival circuit where it won the Special Jury Prize at San Sebastian Film Festival. Vertical Entertainment has released the film on digital and VOD platforms. Green (last seen in Dumbo) is absolutely fantastic and her performance puts her in awards contentions.
Dillon, who last made screen waves, and controversy, in the 2018 film The House That Jack Built, shines as the team leader, and he’s good-looking as ever. Proxima is a film that will bring tears to your eyes and will melt your heart.
Dedalus is a fictional triptych portraying community, love, and loss.
It’s a film that deals with homosexuality and age, with three very different storylines. And while one of them is a bit confusing, it’s a very good piece of work by a first-time director.
A goodlooking young man (newcomer Alexander Horner, a natural) is a bit lost in life, always struggling to make ends meet, going from couch to couch. But he knows what he likes – he enjoys the ‘company’ of older men. He also needs food and shelter during a cold winter in New York City. He is also sexually attracted to older men. And even though a young woman takes him in, nothing satiates his quest for love then older gay client. He meets a succession of them, most of them wealthy, and lonely. They all, of course, take a fancy to him. But he falls for an anxious lawyer (Thomas Jay Ryan) and can foresee a relationship with him, but the lawyer has other things in mind. This second of the three stories in this film is the most hard-hitting and unforgettable.
Directed by Jonah Greenstein, an independent filmmaker, the other two stories deal with a fathers mortality which compels him to leave his home in Los Angeles and move in with his daughter, and the other story takes place in rural Iowa, a grocery cashier watches helplessly as classmates conceal their act of sexual violence against his teenaged step-sister.
All gorgeously directed by Jonah Greenstein, an independent filmmaker. He’s worked with some big names (Rami Malek, Michelle Wiiliams, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras), but it’s this debut, which laces loneliness. beauty and mystery, to create a film that is both startling and memorable.
Now on on Streaming Platforms including Apple TV, Amazon Prime, OVID.tv & Kanopy
Susan Sarandon is amazing as Lily, a woman slowly losing her faculties and who has decided that at the end of a perfect weekend she will choose to die. The perfect weekend includes visits by her two daughters – Jennifer (an unrecognisable Kate Winslet) with husband Michael (Rainn Wilson) and their teenage son Jonathan (Anson Boon); dysfunctional Anna (Mia Wasikowska) and her female partner Chris (Bex Taylor Klaus). Also along for the ride is Lily’s best friend Elizabeth (Lindsey Duncan) as well as her loyal and handsome husband Paul (Sam Neill), who has always been by Lily’s side.
The family is not a perfect one – Jennifer has controlling issues while Anna has never been truthful and transparent about her life. Sure she’s in a same sex relationship but there’s been times where she’s fallen off everyone’s radar – but Lily is still proud of both of her strong daughters who she raised to be just like her. But as the clock ticks to the final moment we know is coming, there is some excellent family time around the house, including the emotional ‘Christmas Dinner’ they have which is Lilly’s last evening meal. There is also lots of tension when several unresolved issues are revealed. ‘Blackbird’ is hard to sit through – it’s very emotional and very real, but up until the end, when every truth has been told and every tear has been wept, Sarandon still holds the screen – and our attention. It’s one of her finest film performances.
In Monsoon a young man of Vietnamese descent, who now lives in Britain, returns to Saigon to return his mother (her ashes) to her home country, a country her and her husband fled during the Vietnamese war. But Vietnam is also a country that Kit (Henry Golding) also knows very little about – he was 5 when they left. So his return to the home country is a poignant one, his father has also died and Kit’s brother is bringing their father’s ashes so him and Kit can bury them together. While Kit returns and visits old friends of his and his mothers, he falls for American Lewis (Parker Sawyers) and establishes a semi-relationship with him. While the gay storyline is a bit irrelevant to the focus and mission of the plot, it’s played out against the backdrop of a city full of traffic, noise, people, motorcycles, and beautiful sunsets that linger in the horizon.
Monsoon also brings us lulled moments – quiet and contemplative – in a film that’s oh so short at 85 minutes.
Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians) is good in the role – but the film itself could’ve explored more of his background and his relationship with his family (perhaps flashbacks) to give more of a background into his homosexuality. In all, if you’re looking for a meditative and quiet film, this film is for you.
An engaging but ultimately flawed twink flick that reinforces the idea that you can only be openly gay in the big city, rather than remaining in the provincial community in which you grew up.
Dating Amber – Amazon Prime’s latest LGBT+ offering to coincide with Pride season. And it’s a cute film, if you’re into soft and gentle twinks being goofy and finding themselves in a sea of prejudice and misunderstanding.
Irish actor Fionn O’Shea is undoubtedly the star here. We’ve seen him before in Handsome Devil (2016), where he played a similarly confused twink alongside the beautiful Nicholas Galitzine. The only difference is that Eddie in Dating Amber is a more rounded and complicated individual than Ned Roche in Handsome Devil, who spends most of the film crushing over his rugby twunk dorm mate, Connor.
In all fairness though, Dating Amber is about two closeted teenagers, not just one. Lola Petticrew gives a strong performance as Amber—a frustrated but determined closeted lesbian who runs a side business renting out one of her mother’s caravans for schoolmates to have romantic liaisons.
Side by side, Amber and Eddie struggle with their sexuality in a hostile school environment and if it weren’t for the fact that both actors are so engaging, this plot premise would make a predictable film into a very predictable and frankly dull-as-ditchwater one.
But somehow O’Shea and Petticrew manage to pull through as their characters start dating one another as a ruse to throw off the incessant crowing from their homophobic classmates.
Trips to Dublin, late-night drug-fuelled escapades, and lies lies lies follow as these two try to convince everyone else, including themselves, that they’re straight.
Eventually, of course, the truth comes out, and Eddie ultimately finds his way. To London, in fact, where the promise of a fulfilling life for this ‘baby gay’ beams into Eddie’s sunny face.
A predictable outcome
What I wanted, though, was a less predictable and ultimately less deceiving ending. We’ve seen it before. A provincial gay boy who is closeted because of his misunderstanding community and family can only find freedom by escaping to the big metropolis.
The consequence of this is that as viewers, and as gay people, in particular, we internalise the assumption that rural, provincial communities are no place for ‘an out gay man’, as Little Britain’s Daffyd Thomas (Only gay in the village) used to tell us repeatedly.
Now, I grew up in a provincial rural village, admittedly in the 2000s, a decade later than this film is set. But, while there weren’t nuns on every street corner signing themselves each time they saw the local bum boy walk into the Co-op, it wasn’t easy. Rural communities tend to be built around heterosexual families and their needs, and there is intense pressure to follow suit. And I felt it.
I went off to university, to the great metropoli of Exeter, Leeds, and Leicester, but have I been any more fulfilled? There are opportunities that big cities present to LGBTQ people which are undeniably advantageous and, ideally, it doesn’t have to be either / or.
Yet Dating Amber makes it precisely into an either/or decision. Either you stay here and this place will kill you, as Amber explains to Eddie, or you go out there, to the big city, and find yourself and be happy.
The result is that rural communities are drained of the kind of social diversity that makes for more tolerant neighbourhoods, and being gay itself becomes synonymous with a kind of metropolitan and urban lifestyle that those of us who are more rural at heart find hard to bear.
What we need, then, are LGBTQ films, like God’s Country, that wrestle hard with the realities of being ‘the only gay in the village’, and where communities themselves go through a process of slow adaptation so that they become welcoming places for all sorts of people.
A young man is sent to prison for killing another man in The Prince – a film which is not your typical prison movie.
The Prince (El Principe), a homoerotic prison drama, out now, is set in a 1970’s Chilean prison. Jaime (Juan Carlos Maldonado), secretly in love with his best friend, in a fit of jealous rage stabs and kills him when he has a dance with another man. Then it’s off to prison for Jaime, 20, young, sexy and good looking – he’s going to be eaten alive in prison. Put into a cell with four other men, one of them named ‘The Stallion’ (Alfredo Castro) takes Jaime under his wing, and then some. They maintain an unlikely romance, while two of their other cellmates cop with each other. But not everything is black and white. A rival gang leader lives on the other side of the prison but’s in the showers, where they all shower together, and where the men are shown in all their glory, becomes dangerous territory.
’The Prince’ is raw, bold, brave, intense and explosive, and it seems to have come out of nowhere. In a country (Chile) where a film like this might not be acceptable – it’s a welcome surprise that it is as good as it is. Grainy looking to give it a completely dark and old look and feel about it, and with very good acting to match – Director Sebastián Muñoz has made a memorable hard-hitting prison drama that is very good and sexy. Hell, even the poster is hot!
Meanwhile, another young very good looking prisoner, who is the lover of the other leader, takes a liking to Jaime and pursues him like mad. But after an incident with The Stallion’s cat tension and rage build up in the prison where it’s every man for himself.
Available On-Demand on all major platforms and on DVD on 7th December
