Roger Walker-Dack at www.queerguru.com

Forty-something-year-old Dan’s (James Roday) life seems to be at something of a crossroads. He is a long time AIDS survivor who has been HIV positive for some 22 years, a fact that he is still reluctant to admit too even though he lives in San Francisco. He is an author suffering from writer block so gets by working as a bouncer at his friend’s run down club where Dan also still insists on hosting a weekly Poetry Slam even though no-one ever shows up.  Well, that is accept his roommate/best friend Paula (Robin Weigert) but then she has her own issues as her […]

Gillian Armstrong’s captivating documentary on three-time Academy Award Winning Costume Designer the larger than life Orry-Kelly starts out with a rather wonderful statement ‘He called himself a hem stitcher, yet he really was a Hollywood Star. In the country he’s come from, that’s bloody amazing, but no-one has ever heard of him’.  The country it refers too is Australia which a very young Orry George Kelly left for the US in the 1920’s to find fame and fortune on Broadway. His career as a chorus boy though he claims was hampered by his ‘weak arms’ and after he had dropped […]

It seems very apt that this highly emotional documentary that tells the poignant stories of 8 gay men who are long-time AIDS survivors is the work of The South Francisco Chronicle as it is Northern California’s largest newspaper and as such was always reporting more than most from the front line of the pandemic.  Since 1981 when the first death was recorded in the city, some 20000 people in the City, mostly gay men, have died from AIDS. The film, the first one that the paper has ever produced, is part of a larger special report featuring interactive digital and […]

It seems very apt that this highly emotional documentary that tells the poignant stories of 8 gay men who are long-time AIDS survivors is the work of The South Francisco Chronicle as it is Northern California’s largest newspaper and as such was always reporting more than most from the front line of the pandemic.  Since 1981 when the first death was recorded in the city, some 20000 people in the City, mostly gay men, have died from AIDS. The film, the first one that the paper has ever produced, is part of a larger special report featuring interactive digital and […]

Moises Serrano is 24 years old.  He has lived in North Carolina for the past 22 1/2 years and is as American as apple pie. Except that he is not. His parents smuggled him and his two sisters across the Mexican border when he was just a baby, and he has been treated by the US Authorities as an undocumented resident ever since. He has also never really fit into any of his peer groups throughout his life.  As he explained,  as a light skinned Mexican he had trouble assimilating with either other immigrants or the local caucasians, and the […]

  Veteran French filmmaker André Téchiné may be the wrong side of 70 now but he shows in his latest movie that he still has a very firm grasp of the sensibilities of teenage boys coming of age. He is perfectly assisted by his co-writer Céline Sciamma the writer/director of quintessential adolescent gay movies such as Tomboy  and Girlhood. This is the story of two strikingly different high-school boys living in the French Pyrenees.  Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein) is a pale effete boy who sports a diamond stud earring and excels at his academic work and cooking and self-defense. Tom (Corentin Fila) is a a biracial boy […]

This shocking and rather provocative movie … the sophomore feature from Austrian actor turned director Klaus Händl deservedly won the prestigious Teddy Award for Best LGBT Feature Film at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.  It is there surprising that since then the reviews have been lukewarm at best, and even odder that it is not the violent aspect that has evoked the criticism but the way that Händl goes into great detail with the gay protagonists relationship as it shoots from one extreme to another.  We certainly differ from this viewpoint as this powerful intense drama has remained very firmly in our conscious since […]

40 year-old Dean is trying not to have a mid-life crisis, but his chances of succeeding are slim.  He’s a very successful graphic designer in Silverlake California who is starting to loath his good paying clients because of their poor taste levels.  Now because the lazy eye he’s had from birth is playing up, his eye doctor has just prescribed tri-focal glasses which he is having great difficulty adjusting too.  Then his rather solitary and seemingly empty life is suddenly disturbed by an email that arrives totally out of the blue.  It’s from Alex an ex-boyfriend who broke his heart when […]

The only chance that Joey (Lola Kirke) has of improving her life choices is by enlisting in the Army.  They at least will not only let her see the world but also fund her entry into college too. She is a recent high school graduate in a economically depressed small Pennsylvania town, and with jobs extremely scarce, she gets low-paying work with a dairy farmer looking after his herd of cattle and helping out at his ice cream stand.   It is whilst she is working there one night that she gets picked up by Rayna (Breeda Wool) an attractive and flirtatious […]

Canadian filmmaker Stephen Dunn’s tale of a young gay man’s coming of age story is one of the most imaginative and insightful movies in that genre we have seen in quite a while. Set in his native Newfoundland it’s the story of Oscar (Jack Fulton) who at the start is a relatively happy 8 year old whose seemingly idyllic life is suddenly brutally interrupted when his parents announce they are going to get  a divorce.  His mother (Joanne Kelly) is moving out which makes the situation even worse for Oscar who is then fobbed off with a gift of a hamster intended as some […]