Roger Walker-Dack

Beatrice (Juliet Stevenson) and her 15 year old son Elliot (Alex Lawther) have arrived at their family’s getaway vacation home in the South of France for one last time.  As the house is now to be sold as Beatrice and her husband are finally getting a divorce, they are there to pack up all its contents.   After flailing around for decades in a marriage for which she confides to her neighbor never ever really brought her much joy, it is time to move on.  Not that she looks any happier at the thought of a fresh start as she always […]

To us non-residents of Harlem the fact that 25 years after  Jenni Livingston’s seminal documentary Paris Is Burning, ‘voguing’ is very much alive in the dance clubs and community spaces in this corner of New York is quite a shock.  In fact it’s been re-shaped and re-invented to bring it more in line with the needs and dreams of it’s present day exponents who, we learn from this new movie, are mainly at-risk LGBTQ youth. There may be much more of a political edge to the stories of the young people who feature in Kiki than in Livingston’s earlier film, but the […]

The openly gay Mexican filmmaker Julián Hernández has won the prestigious Teddy Award for Best LGBT Feature Movie from the Berlinale twice, which is an exceptional achievement that has only been matched by the late British auteur Derek Jarman. Hernández’s last feature film (for which he won his 2nd Teddy) and which was probably his best too, was  ‘I Am Happiness on Earth’  and it was typical of his raison d’etre with its sparse dialogue and it’s emphasis on the aesthetics of some handsome Latino men, and very little attempt to include a conventional plot. Now he has extended this forward in […]

Filmmaker Aaron Brookner set out to find the lost negatives of ‘Burroughs : The Movie’ a critically acclaimed film made by his uncle Howard Brookner who had died of AIDS in 1989 aged just 34 years old. Before his untimely demise Howard had made just two feature documentaries …..the other one was on Robert Wilson the avant garde Theater Director …..and he had also just shot his first narrative film ‘Bloodhounds of Broadway’ which was in post-production at the time of his death. The 1983 movie on the celebrated queer writer and Beat Generation poet   William S Burroughs got Howard […]

  Edu is not the first middle-aged man to fall in love with a young hustler that he has picked up in the streets of Rio.  It’s not just the sex that draws him to keep returning hooking him up with  Fabio time and time again as he really has developed an emotional attachment to the young man, and it seems that the feelings may actually be reciprocated. The two men move in totally different circles. Edu is a very intense and serious intellectual and a playwright who is not in the best frame of moods as he is currently […]

  Chemsex is an unidentifiable issue to most people but after watching this excellent but scarily sobering new documentary from filmmakers Max Gogarty and William Fairman of VICE you will see how this fast-growing phenomenon is deeply affecting a certain part of the urban gay community.  It’s about gay men ‘slamming’, which is evidently the more sociably acceptable term now used for injecting drugs and shooting up, and all for the purposes of having some very extreme sex.  It is a lot more complicated than them just wanting to have the best inhibited sex that is possible, but it is […]

  The true story of the young woman who ruled Sweden as its Queen for a mere 10 years in the middle of the 17th Century has been told several times already, most notable in the 1933 movie Queen Christina starring Greta Garbo. Whilst this early version also touched on how fiercely independent the young ruler was, it failed to address the more important aspect of her sexuality, which this new movie by the veteran Finnish Director Mika Kaurismäki finally does. Kristina (Malin Buska) .. as she is called in this movie .. inherited the Throne at the age of 6 when her […]

  Life seems to have been unchanged for ever in this rather boring and isolated Dutch village, but little do its residents know that by the end of the sweltering summer that is about to start, nothing will ever be the same again.  The story that unfolds through the eyes of teenage Annie or “Ms Silent’ as she is better known, and it starts peacefully enough with her biking in the countryside with a pack of other village girls. They alway pass by the Power Station which everyone loves because it provides jobs and even some culture for the entire […]

  Colby is ‘out’ to his family and whilst his mother and his sister accept his sexuality, his father can barely tolerate it and refuses to even discuss it. It’s a pity as Colby now has a steady boyfriend Rusty, who he not only loves but he wants to go into business with too and open a restaurant together.  Neither of then are in the first flush of youth and so their relationship marks the perfect time for them to finally settle down. Colby has shared all this news with the women in his family but has been trying to […]

  Within a few minutes of the opening sequence of Rob Williams latest gay ‘boy-lit’ drama you know exactly who everybody will be out to kill. Narcissistic pretty boy singer Justin James thinks the world revolves him, and it certainly seems to in this loft apartment complex packed head to toe with insecure gay men in Tampa. Florida. Besides himself there is only one other person who actually likes him as he seems to go out of his way just to annoy everyone else he seems to come across especially if he thinks they want to get into his pants. […]