As I sit here, with a bleak post-Heartstoppers hole in my TV viewing life, the UK’s brilliant (and currently embattled) Channel 4 comes to the rescue with a very different queer love story, Big Boys. It also conveniently fills that gaping space left by Sex Education and Derry Girls. Adapted from writer, narrator, and executive... Continue Reading →
Meat Rack cute – Film Review: Fire Island ★★★★
Jane Austen was an astute observer of human behaviour. Behaviour that's changed very little in the two hundred years or so since she wrote Pride and Prejudice, the nuances of which can just as readily be found among gay men summering on Fire Island in 2022 as they could in Austen's nineteenth century high society... Continue Reading →
Elliot Page honored with 2021 Outfest Achievement Award “we don’t talk enough about how important representation is & how many lives it saves”
As the 39th annual Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ Film Festival drew to a close with the LA premiere of Bobbi Jo Hart's rousing documentary feature Fanny: The Right To Rock, Oscar-nominee Elliot Page was honored by Outfest with the organization's 2021 Achievement Award, making him the first publicly identifying trans person in the history of... Continue Reading →
Outfest LA 2021 Exclusive: an insider’s guide to the lineup from Outfest’s Director of Festival Programming Mike Dougherty
As the 39th edition of the world’s largest LGBTQIA+ film festival, Outfest LA 2021, opens this Friday August 13th—boasting 175 titles, with a mix of outdoor events, indoor screenings for vaccinated moviegoers, and online streaming options—Outfest's Director of Festival Programming Mike Dougherty offers an exclusive insider's guide to help you get acquainted with some of... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: Swan Song writer-director Todd Stephens “I wanted to cast a queer actor to play this queer part”
Filmmaker Todd Stephens returns to his hometown of Sandusky, following 1998's Edge of Seventeen and 2001's Gypsy 83, to complete his Ohio trilogy with Swan Song, "an instant queer classic" (TheQueer Review), now playing in US theaters. The bittersweet comedy which premiered at SWXW Online 2021, stars the legendary Udo Kier as Mister Pat, a... Continue Reading →
Outfest 2021 Exclusive Interview: filmmaker Jeffrey Schwarz on Boulevard! A Hollywood Story “how many queer stories are buried in boxes, sitting in people’s attics & basements?”
Jeffrey Schwarz, the Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker behind Vito, I Am Divine, and Tab Hunter Confidential, returns to Outfest this month for the world premiere of his latest feature, Boulevard! A Hollywood Story. The fascinating film unearths the little-known attempt by actress Gloria Swanson to stage an original Broadway musical based on the movie she is... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: Oscar-nominee Abigail Breslin on her LGBTQ character in Stillwater “we didn’t want to make the character or their storyline solely about her sexuality”
In Oscar-winning Spotlight filmmaker Tom McCarthy's suspenseful new movie Stillwater, which world premiered at this month's Cannes Film Festival, Abigail Breslin plays Allison, a young American woman serving time in a Marseille prison for the murder of her girlfriend while studying in France, a crime she insists she did not commit. When her estranged conservative... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: kiki ball legend Christopher “Afrika” Quarles on their debut movie role as Mother McQueen in Port Authority “who you see on screen is me”
Writer-director Danielle Lessovitz's Port Authority made history at Cannes in 2019, when it world premiered in the Un Certain Regard section, becoming the first film competing at the festival to feature a trans woman of colour—Leyna Bloom—in a lead role. Meanwhile some of the movie's cast, including Christopher "Afrika" Quarles, memorably turned the festival's red... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: “I wanted to break as many rules as possible” Isabel Sandoval on her early films Señorita & Apparition now playing on Criterion Channel
Filipina filmmaker and actress Isabel Sandoval caught the attention of international critics when her stunning third feature film—which she wrote, directed, produced, edited, and starred in—Lingua Franca premiered at Venice in 2019, making her the first publicly identifying trans woman of colour to screen work in competition at the festival. The acclaimed film, which immerses... Continue Reading →
Book Review: Shooting Midnight Cowboy – Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic by Glenn Frankel ★★★★
I'm not going to call Midnight Cowboy a masterpiece, that is a word that gets thrown around too much (like luxury it has lost it has lost all meaning.) Midnight Cowboy is better than that. It is a perfect film. All of the elements: the script, the direction, the casting, the costumes, the cinematography, the... Continue Reading →