Film

Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis. READ THE REVIEW HERE: https://thequeerreview.com/2023/01/10/film-review-all-the-beauty-and-the-bloodshed-neon/#more-101728

CloseOpens Friday, February 24thMultiple Showings a Day Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival “Close” centers on two inseparable 13-year-old boys who find their bond tested with the start of a new school year. When the film opens, the best friends, Leo and Remi, live an idyllic existence, spending afternoons biking between each other’s homes and nights whispering under the covers. But those halcyon summer days soon come to an end when the new term begins and a group of unfamiliar classmates begin to question their closeness.

Cinema might have progressed beyond burying its gays but that doesn’t mean it can’t assign them a fate worse than death – lifelong pining. This is so prevalent in culture that it has its own term: queer yearning, an achey, all-consuming desire in which years of repression spill forth into a crush so forbidden, so unquenchable, that the only way to relieve its pains is by penetrating a peach.Hurtling into this lineage is the Macedonian-Australian film-maker Goran Stolevski’s Of an Age, a pinwheeling, decade-spanning odyssey of teenage kicks and their prolonged aftershocks. And I mean hurtling: from the off, Stolevski’s direction possesses the […]

It’s the 25th anniversary of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival (SF IndieFest) and it takes place February 2-12, 2023. This year’s festival includes 62 shorts and 35 features from 14 countries. There are 34 films that are local to the Bay Area.  “While the city might have changed over the last 25 years, SF IndieFest’s mission and curation hasn’t,” says Festival Director Jeff Ross. “We still seek the new and unusual to present to San Francisco film fans.”  For 25 years, the mission of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival has been to seek out new film discoveries for Bay Area film fans to enjoy. Now, with the […]

The 15th Mostly British Film Festival runs February 9-16 with something for every moviegoer’s taste.The annual tribute to English language foreign films opens with the Northern California premiere of EMILY, a romanticized and sensual perspective on the life of Wuthering Heights author Emily Bronte. Opening night features actress-turned-director Frances O’Connor on Zoom discussing her rapturously-reviewed debut film. In this Sunday’s Pink, Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle named EMILY first in his list of “Movies to Look Out for in 2023.” The festival closes with ALL THAT BREATHES. This poignant story of brothers who run a bird hospital in New Delhi […]

BLUE CAFTAN (France/Morocco/Belgium/Denmark, narrative feature, dir. Maryam Touzani) Set at a bespoke dress shop in Morocco, this unusual love-triangle tale avoids heated melodrama, instead exploring the lives of its three main characters with intimacy and great tenderness. Expert performances and a stirring resolution reveal the complexities and profundities of enduring love. In Arabic with English subtitles – California Premiere BODY PARTS (US, documentary feature, dir. Kristy Guevara-Flanagan) Hollywood stars and relative unknowns alike share their experiences shooting sex scenes for TV and movies in this wide-ranging primer on the perils of being female in Hollywood. Deftly intercut among the interviews, including with Alexandra Billings, […]

VICTIM Friday, Sept. 23, 2022 –7 p.m. & Sunday, Sept. 25, 2022 – 4 p.m. “‘I wanted him!’ With these words Dirk Bogarde consigned his matinee idol alter-ego to history, and a gripping landmark in gay cinema was born. Bogarde’s closeted, married lawyer Melville Farr is drawn into exposing a terrifying blackmail ring when an admirer (Peter McEnery) commits suicide rather than implicate him. Supporting the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee, director Basil Dearden, producer Michael Relph and screenwriter Janet Green denounced the poisonous, institutionalized homophobia gay men of all classes faced, and cleverly packaged the politics within an accessible crime-thriller. VICTIM, and […]