Arts & Entertainment

OUTwatch and Rialto Cinemas present Fairyland Starting Oct. 10 Rialto Cinemas, Sebastopol Multiple showings a day Following the sudden and tragic death of her mother, young Alysia is uprooted by her father Steve in hopes of restarting his life. They move to 1970s San Francisco where Steve develops his poetic and personal writing and begins to openly date men. Steve’s bohemian lifestyle clashes with the expectations of parenthood from both the outside world and Alysia herself, who occasionally wishes for less of the independence her father gives her. As Alysia grows into a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, […]

OUTwatch and Rialto Cinemas present Plainclothes Oct. 3 Rialto Cinemas, Sebastopol Multiple showings a day A promising undercover officer assigned to lure and arrest gay men defies orders when he falls in love with a target. Plainclothes is brimming with an atmosphere of paranoia and anxiety. As Lucas, a young police officer contending with a secret attraction to men, Tom Blyth palpably embodies this tension in a breakout performance. Straining to fill a prescribed role in the implicitly straight culture of the police force, he carries the crushing weight of both the consequences of his increasingly fraught undercover work as […]

On paper, at least, we would always prefer gay actors playing gay roles for several reasons, but there are wonderful exceptions, such as Irish Paul Mescal and British Josh O’Connor in The History of Sound.  O’Connor’s breakthrough role was playing a closeted gay farmer in God’s Own Country,  whilst Mescal made us all fall in love when playing gay in All of Us Strangers.  The two have shown such a sensitivity that they can inhabit queer roles without the merest hint of stereotyping.  When the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival recently, it received rave reviews, although Mescal was annoyed by some (lazy) critics who insisted on […]