The brilliant hybrid documentary How to Tell a Secret busts open the conversation about HIV in Ireland. Winner of Best Documentary Film at the Irish Film Festival London, the film offers stories of HIV+ people, queer and straight, and the culture of silence that often surrounds them. Breaking through that silence are two activists and podcasters... Continue Reading →
Mardi Gras Film Festival 2023 Review: How to Tell a Secret ★★★★★
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: Gateways Grind ★★★1/2
The Gateways Club, or the Gates as it was known, was the centre of lesbian London for decades. A watering hole in the heart of Chelsea, it one of the only exclusively lesbian venues in London, frequented by a mix of women of all classes, including the likes of author Patricia Highsmith. Running from the... 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 →
LGBTQ+ highlights at 13th annual DOC NYC running in-person & online November 9-27
America's largest documentary festival, DOC NYC, returns with its 13th annual edition running in-person November 9th-17th at New York's IFC Center, SVA Theatre, and Cinépolis Chelsea, with over 110 feature-length documentaries among over 200 films and events, including 29 world premieres and 27 US premieres. With most films available digitally to US viewers, the festival... 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 →
Sydney Film Festival 2022 Review: Fashion Babylon ★★★
Gianluca Matarrese’s Fashion Babylon is a documentary more interested in the lives on fashion’s fringes than the glamour on the runway. Following a trio of notable fashion obsessives, Matarrese’s cold lens highlights how wafer thin glamour is, and how hollow art can be… but just maybe, for a few, it is still redeemable. Musician/artist Casey... 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 →
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 →