Roger Walker-Dack at www.queerguru.com

Mexican filmmaker Ernesto Contreras’s fourth feature film with a script by his brother (Carlos Contreras) is a magical mythical tale about the search for a language that is on the brink of extinction, because the last two remaining elderly speakers are bitter enemies who haven’t exchanged a word for the past 50 years. Martin (Fernando Álvarez Rebeil ) is a young linguist expert who has traveled to a remote part of Mexico in the hope of recording some conversations with these last two people known to be fluent in Zikril. There was a 3rd person but she dies practically as soon as […]

When 14 year old Ulysses’s (Luka Kain) father suddenly dies, his mother (Margot Bingham) has to take on a second job to make ends meet. She somewhat reluctantly accepts an offer from Ulysses’ ultra-conservative Aunt Rose (Regina Taylor) to come to take care of him and his younger sibling after work until she gets home. The teenager is in the throws of discovering his sexuality and identity, and when Rose finds out he has been secretly trying on his mother’s shoes she doesn’t let up on him for one single moment. On a whim he takes himself off on the subway […]

  If David France’s Oscar nominated ‘How To Survive a Plague‘ is recognized as the seminal movie on AIDS in the US, then Robin Campillo’s stunning new masterpiece BPM (Beats Per Minute) is undoubtably Europe’s candidate for the title.  His sprawling and somewhat harrowing tale that centers on the ACT UP group in Paris is based on his own experiences as an activist in the 1990’s, but he adds a fictional love story that makes his account of the pandemic in France that much more personal and highly emotional. The story starts at the Group’s volatile weekly meetings (WM) where […]

A rather compelling Tony Award Winner Lena Hall in her first starring role in a movie, makes this rather cute musical a much more entertaining experience than one may have otherwise expected from what is a somewhat very predictable drama.  Hall plays Becks an aspiring musician who packs up her life in New York to drive to L.A. to join the love of her life.  She makes better time on the journey than she expects, and arriving a day early surprises her girlfriend who is the midst of entertaining a naked girl in her room. With her tail between her […]

For his first feature film writer/director Mike Roma reunites with actor Patrick Reilly who starred in his successful TV series Danny the Manny about a cute gay out-of-work actor in Hollywood having to become a nanny to a surly 6 year old simply to survive.  This time round Reilly plays Danny a rather obnoxious, aspiring but unemployed gay screenwriter, and even though his character is beyond annoying, Reilly the actor puts in such a winning performance that we cannot help but like him. The story is a fresh take on the whole mother/son dynamic in what appears to be an […]

God’s Own Country a breakout hit at both Sundance and Berlinale Festivals (where it was nominated for a Teddy for Best Queer Feature) is a remarkable debut from openly gay Brit writer/director Frances Lee, and unquestionably one of best queer love stories for a very long time.  Set in the wilds of Yorkshire (hence the title) with two young sheep farmers, the comparison with Brokeback Mountain is inevitable, but frankly Lee’s film offers entirely different perspectives on the unexpected relationship between these two rough country men, and most of all, it offers hope. 24 year old Johnny (Josh O’Connor) is […]

Married lesbian couple Cari Searcy and Kim McKeand who live with their son in Mobil, say that their friends always ask “Why Alabama? You must be crazy.”  It is the exact same question that any LGBTQ person will probably also ask at the beginning of this new compelling documentary that tells the story of their lives, and that of another lesbian couple who have to deal with so much more intransigence and unabashed homophobia in this the most conservative State in the US.  However what we initially perceive will be a tale of almost sheer helplessness, turns out in the […]

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Jeffrey Schwarz has added another subject to his series of documentaries on iconic LGBT figures which so far have included Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon, Tab Hunter Confidential, I Am Divine, and Vito. This time his subject Allan Carr may be not quite so well known to the general public, but his successful career as an infamous larger-than-life flamboyant Hollywood Producer and Agent make him a natural fit for one of Schwarz’s excellent and very compelling profiles. Carr was born Allan Solomon in 1937, the only son of a wealthy Jewish family in Chicago and his parents spoilt him rotten, and […]

In this documentary that tells the story of the leading Argentinian LGBT activist Carlos Jáuregui, someone comments at one point ‘it’s important for our community to know where we have come from’  to which we would add, it is equally vital that we know who propelled us along the way too.  Every LGBT community has a hero, often unsung and unknown to people outside of their reach, and this movie tells the story of one in particular who was the outspoken driving force for equality in Buenos Aires. When Carlos Jáuregui finished his University degree in the late 1970’s he then went […]