This Friday May 7th sees the premiere of the third and final season of the biting and touching comedy series Shrill on Hulu. Its co-creator and star Aidy Bryant returns as Annie, who is feeling energized by her breakup with dud boyfriend Ryan (Luka Jones) and her newfound momentum at the culture website The Thorn,... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: filmmaker Samuel Van Grinsven on his seductive queer coming-of-age tale Sequin in a Blue Room
Writer-director Samuel Van Grinsven’s seductive, visually striking debut feature, Sequin in a Blue is the compelling story of Sequin (Conor Leach) a gay teenager exploring his burgeoning sexuality in the digital age, who is obsessed with an anonymous hookup app and the no-strings encounters he arranges through it. When he finds his way into the... Continue Reading →
Film Review: Moffie ★★★★★
As writer-director Oliver Hermanus' Moffie opens in Apartheid South Africa in 1981, Nicholas (Kai Luke Brümmer) has just turned 16 making him, along with all other white men of his age, eligible for mandatory military service at a time when the country is engaged in a military operation at the border with Soviet-backed Angola in... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: filmmaker Oliver Hermanus on his BAFTA nominated Moffie “I didn’t want the film to get stuck in the weeds of becoming a queer fantasy of men in the military”
In 2009 queer South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus' debut feature Shirley Adams, which he made while still a student at the prestigious London Film School, premiered in competition at Locarno, with his subsequent film, Beauty (Skoonheid) winning the Queer Palm at the 64th Cannes Film Festival, where it played in the Un Certain Regard competition... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: Moffie star Kai Luke Brümmer “It was really interesting to interrogate being a young man who’s turned into a weapon”
Ahead of the US theatrical and on demand release of the acclaimed, BAFTA-nominated fourth feature from writer-director Oliver Hermanus, Moffie, this Friday April 9th, The Queer Review's editor James Kleinmann had an exclusive chat with its star Kai Luke Brümmer. Brümmer, who makes his impressive big screen acting debut in the film, portrays sixteen-year-old Nicholas... Continue Reading →
It’s A Sin: Dr Emily Garside’s guide to the HIV/AIDS narratives to read & watch next
Dr Emily Garside's guide to which HIV/AIDS narratives to read and watch next after Russell T Davies' acclaimed series It's A Sin. There is a vast array of work to choose from. Since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic those affected began telling their stories, both as an act of memorial, remembering those the government... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: Shoplifters of the World filmmaker Stephen Kijak “growing up queer in the 80s I was that little Morrissey wannabe wearing thrift store clothes & trying to figure out my sexuality”
The music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life, sang Morrissey on The Smiths song Panic, released in 1986, a year before the band broke up. Lyrics that no doubt spoke to a teenaged Stephen Kijak growing up in small town Massachusetts and that certainly resonate with the dedicated fan... Continue Reading →
SXSW Online 2021 Film Review: Swan Song ★★★★★
Writer-director Todd Stephens returns to his hometown, and the setting of his 1998 gay coming of age movie Edge of Seventeen—Sandusky, Ohio—for his latest feature Swan Song, which received its world premiere at SXSW Online today. Screen legend Udo Kier stars as Pat Pitsenbarger, a retired gay hairdresser living a monotonous existence in a hospital-like... Continue Reading →
Pedro Almodóvar’s The Human Voice ★★★★
Pedro Almodóvar's intoxicating English-language debut, the thirty-minute short film The Human Voice, is "freely based on" the play by Jean Cocteau that was first staged in Paris in 1930, which the filmmaker previously referenced in 1987's Law of Desire, and initially inspired him to write 1988's Women On the Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown. A... Continue Reading →
BFI Flare 2021 Film Review: Sublet ★★★★
Veteran Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox's outstanding new feature Sublet, co-written with Itay Segal, opens with the arrival of a jetlagged and disorientated fifty something gay man, Michael (The Inheritance's John Benjamin Hickey) to bustling Tel Aviv. He's a travel writer for The New York Times who has come to uncover the "real" city over a... Continue Reading →
