How To Tell A Secret is a documentary. How To Tell A Secret is a documentary about the filming of a documentary. How To Tell A Secret is a documentary about the filming of a documentary about the staging of a play. How To Tell A Secret is a documentary about the filming of a... Continue Reading →
Mardi Gras Film Festival 2023 Review: In Her Words – 20th Century Lesbian Fiction ★★★
Chronicling key figures in lesbian fiction from the 1920s to the 90s, Lisa Marie Evans and Marianne K. Martin's In Her Words: 20th Century Lesbian Fiction is an exhaustive walk through individual author's lives and works using a range of new and archival interviews. Without preamble, we are thrown into a discussion of Radclyffe Hall’s... Continue Reading →
Outfest LA 2022 Film Reviews: Nelly & Nadine ★★★★1/2 / Regret To Inform You ★★★★
Many film festival programmers look at a collection of films and realize they’re all speaking with each other, the themes reverberating across the divide, that they’re tapping into the zeitgeist, crying out together. Perhaps due to the past couple of years of COVID lockdown and loss, a deep well of loneliness has informed many filmmaking... Continue Reading →
Outfest LA 2022 Film Review: ALL MAN The International Male Story ★★★★
Following its world premiere at Tribeca last month, directors Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed's delectable ALL MAN: The International Male Story plays the 40th Anniversary Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ+ Film Festival on Saturday, July 16th. The feature documentary chronicles the history of the alluring men's fashion catalogue, International Male, with insights from the insiders... Continue Reading →
Hugh Nini & Neal Treadwell’s vintage photography book LOVING brought to the screen in breathtaking 100 Years of Men in Love: The Accidental Collection
In October 2020, The Queer Review spoke with Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell about their stunning book LOVING A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850s-1950s. It's a collection of previously unpublished vernacular photography depicting romantic love between men that powerfully and movingly reasserts both that love is love and that we’ve always been here.... Continue Reading →
Mardi Gras Film Festival 2022 Reviews: Seyran Ateş: Sex, Revolution & Islam (★★★) & Hating Peter Tatchell (★★★1/2)
Two very different documentaries playing at the Mardi Gras Film Festival 2022 focus on individual LGBTQ+ activists in different walks of life: controversial gay rights warrior Peter Tatchell in Hating Peter Tatchell, and progressive Islamic campaigner Seyran Ateş in Seyran Ateş: Sex, Revolution and Islam. Seyran Ateş is a human rights lawyer and Imam, born... Continue Reading →
Sundance 2022 Film Review: My Old School ★★★★
UPDATE: Magnolia Pictures will release MY OLD SCHOOL in theaters on Friday, July 22nd in New York (Film Forum) and July 29th in Los Angeles (Laemmle Monica Film Center), plus other select theaters. Filmmaker Jono McLeod returns to his old school, Bearsden Academy in an upmarket Glasgow suburb, with his intriguing feature documentary My Old... Continue Reading →
Sundance 2022 Film Review: Sirens ★★★★
UPDATE: Screens at the 40th Anniversary Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ+ Film Festival on Sunday, July 17th at 7pm at Harmony Gold. Rita Baghdadi's feature documentary Sirens, which world premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, is a nuanced, intimate, and upbeat portrait of Lebanon's only all-female thrash metal band, Slave to Sirens. Although it opens... Continue Reading →
Film Review: Cured ★★★★
Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer's riveting feature documentary Cured, which opens the fall season of PBS' Independent Lens on Monday October 11th, examines the fascinating chapter in queer history that saw gay liberation activists successfully overturn the US psychiatric profession's classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. Using archive photographs and video footage, recently discovered... Continue Reading →
Outfest LA 2021 Film Review: Rebel Dykes ★★★★★
Harri Shanahan and Sian Williams' feature documentary Rebel Dykes, which receives its Los Angeles premiere at Outfest LA 2021 on Saturday August 14th (also screening virtually August 15th-17th), is a rousing, celebratory, and considered examination of London's rebel dyke subculture of the 1980s and its legacy. The film's punky, DIY aesthetic captures the anarchic spirit... Continue Reading →