Movie Reviews -
Gay Themed

This artsy little film basically follows a young gay guy bouncing through one hookup after another across Hong Kong, and what makes it interesting isn't really the sex itself but everything that happens around it, these long, drifting conversations between him and whoever he's with, sometimes a bit clichéd, sometimes genuinely thoughtful, about life and the world and where they all fit into it. Most of the men he meets aren't even originally from Hong Kong either, just like him in a way, all these transplants who've landed in the same sprawling city and keep crossing paths through an app. There isn't much more story than that, which made me think this is really just the director using one guy's hookups as a way to look at intimacy and loneliness across this whole scattered community of men. Our lead is in his twenties, gay, single, restless about what he's actually doing with his life, and almost constantly horny, and the film just rides along with him from ...

This film is a genuinely moving story about courage, identity and inner freedom, centered on an intersex person trying to figure out who they really are. The fact that an actual intersex actor was cast in the lead role is genuinely worth applauding. It is apparently a remake of a classic film of same name that came out in 1972. Since I have not seen the film, I really have references to compare, which is good.  Set in Spain, we meet Adela, a woman in her twenties and the only child of a conservative couple living in a small provincial town. Her days are mostly spent at the family antique shop, and her whole life has been shaped by her mother's overprotectiveness and total silence around her intersex condition, something she's faced real social discrimination for. Despite all the restrictions placed on her, she finds odd little pockets of normalcy in her life, and her closest connection is a gay priest, basically the only person she feels she can talk to freely. That quiet routi...

I genuinely cannot remember the last time a Thai BL rom-com made me this happy. Lately I've mostly just been rolling my eyes at how silly this genre can get, but something about this one really got under my skin in the best way. Across ten episodes, each running about fifty to fifty five minutes, we watch how one ordinary, down to earth guy completely flips the world of a ridiculously wealthy man who's been living in his own bubble, someone who thinks money solves everything and has zero clue how regular middle class people actually live, a guy who's completely disconnected from reality but secretly obsessed with soap operas. Two people from totally different worlds end up colliding, and what follows is this perfect mix of laughter, blushing, and emotional gut punches. Thee comes from serious money and runs his family's perfume business, living alone despite all that wealth. One day he tries to throw a huge amount of cash at a model who works for his company just to sle...

This vertical drama once again grabs pretty much every stereotype the gay vertical BL genre has to offer, throws them all together, and serves it right back to us. You've got the classic friends to lovers angle, the unhinged girlfriend of the supposedly straight guy, plenty of family drama. The one thing missing this time was the usual mafia subplot, but otherwise you know exactly what you're signing up for. Our leads are Cal and Ricky. Ricky is the wrestling team captain and also makes a habit of bullying Cal constantly, throwing gay slurs at him whenever he gets the chance. Cal's father happens to be the wrestling coach, and Cal is genuinely terrified of him. After one bullying incident goes too far, the coach decides Ricky needs to start training Cal personally. Wrestling actually matters a lot to Ricky because things at home are rough, money is tight and his mother is physically abusive, so he agrees to take it on. What starts as humiliation and outright hostility slowl...

This series is a sweet, low key romance set in the cosmetics industry, and honestly I can't think of another BL that's used this particular backdrop before, so at least that part feels fresh. But once you get past the setting, it falls right back into the usual pattern, two attractive leads who fall for each other, run into a string of misunderstandings, work through them, and end up together by the finish. The good news is the simplicity actually works here, and the leads are likable enough to carry it. At just eight episodes, twenty five minutes each, it's an easy watch you can get through quickly. Our two leads are Mamiya and Sahashi. Mamiya is warm, upbeat, and a hardworking cosmetics consultant who's genuinely popular with his clients, something he's wanted to do since he was a kid after watching a hardworking man do the same job. That same admiration turned into a crush, and that guy is now his boss. Sahashi, on the other hand, is fairly new to the company, ke...

This was a genuinely interesting genre to stumble into, a tragicomedy about a guy spiraling through a toxic situationship and a bad breakup. Story-wise it's probably not breaking new ground, but the way it's put together feels really fresh and the whole approach to the topic stands out. It takes a pretty honest, unfiltered look at queer dating, body image, and that constant struggle with self-worth. The nonlinear structure, paired with quick energetic editing and voiceover, really pays off. The whole message is basically that sometimes you have to look back before you can actually move forward. The film opens with Benji getting dumped by his boyfriend. He spirals hard trying to deal with the rejection, drinking every day, with his mom growing increasingly worried about him. He eventually realizes that to move forward he has to revisit his past first. Benji has figured out he's submissive and tends to go for men who are dominant and a bit rough with him in bed, but he still ...

There's this trend I keep noticing where a handful of gay porn performers are trying to break into reality TV. I've watched a couple of these shows now and credit where it's due, these guys are clearly stepping outside their comfort zone. Whether the shows themselves are actually good is a totally separate question though. OutTV is one of the pioneers in this space, and after watching this one my first reaction was that it's heavily scripted. There's just no way this counts as reality, and that becomes painfully obvious the second the police show up and arrest one of the cast members. Producers will clearly do whatever it takes to get a reaction out of viewers. That said, I'm sure there's an audience that genuinely enjoys this kind of thing, and just because it's not for me doesn't mean I get to judge it outright. Six episodes here, about twenty minutes each. The show is set in Miami where Boomer Banks is putting together some kind of residency, a wo...

This micro budget film was genuinely one of the worst things I've sat through. The plot feels completely random, like someone shot a bunch of unrelated scenes and then scrambled to stitch them into something resembling a story afterward. It's confusing, way too crowded, and plays out like a sloppy B-movie full of characters you can barely tell apart. I kept asking myself why anyone would even make something like this, and the wild part is this isn't even some forgotten relic from the 90s. There's also a ridiculous amount of full frontal and ass nudity that serves absolutely no purpose. Honestly I struggled to even locate a coherent story underneath all of it. I was so lost watching this that I actually had to look up the plot online afterward just to understand what was supposed to be happening. So here's the gist. There's a disturbed cemetery worker named Dennis who hides serious physical disfigurements under this creepy hood, and he develops an obsessive, unhi...

I'd been hearing about this film for a while. Apparently a few film festivals actually turned it down because it pushes so hard on the boundaries of queer storytelling. The whole thing happens over one long, boozy night in Los Angeles between an internet sex worker and his former middle school teacher, who's a convicted sex offender, and it goes straight into taboo stuff, trauma, and abuse that never really got dealt with. Now that I've actually seen it, I get why festivals were nervous. There's this idea sitting underneath the whole film, that wanting to be desired and wanting to be loved can look almost the same on the outside while being totally different things underneath. Aaron Eagle works as a fetish cam performer and he gets off on humiliating his viewers, throwing slurs like faggot at them, and apparently there's a real audience for that. When someone offers him fifty grand to spend a night with a stranger, he says yes without thinking twice and shows up at ...

Another day, another vertical BL, and honestly I'm starting to lose track of whether these shows are actually different from each other or if it's just the same angst, same rich guy poor guy setup, same debt to pay off, recycled every single time. Every now and then one looks like it might break the mold but it ends up blending right back into the pile, and this one is no exception. Shane and Roman are boxing rivals. Without Roman knowing, his dad's female enforcer threatens Shane and tells him to throw the match or his coach gets killed, but Shane refuses to play along and beats Roman anyway. When Roman finds out what she tried to pull, he fires her on the spot, apologizes to Shane, and pays off his debt for him. Shane though assumes Roman was in on the whole thing from the start and won't accept any of it. So Roman comes up with a plan and hires Shane as his personal assistant and coach to help him train. It's pretty clear early on that Roman has feelings for Shan...

I am not even sure what was the point of making this film. It is a moody, gay-tinged drama about two rootless drifters who try to communicate with each other while painting the Pacific Northwest walls and object with graffiti. The film barely has dialogues lasting 15 minutes total. You can fast forward the whole thing and still not miss out on anything at all. Nick, a young teenager lives a life that revolves around eating, sleeping and tagging empty wall space in Portland’s bleak industrial downtown. He shoplifts paints, fruits whatever he needs and ends up sleeping on streets many time. An unexpected bond established with Jesse, who is from a more affluent home but is also very much into graffiti. They tag together, photographing each other in front of their joint efforts and stay together. Jesse even advances sex to Nick one night but after that things change. Jesse rejects his further advances and decamps to Seattle. When Nick finds him, Jesse tells him that they are two different ...

To My Shore is a dark, psychologically heavy Chinese BL that happens to be set in Thailand, though honestly the location barely matters here. I guess the whole purpose was so that a Chinese BL could have a proper release and find its audience. (We all know about strict China laws around homosexuality). This isn't your typical sweet romance at all. It's a heavy psychological drama about two broken men colliding in a way that's devastating and moving at the same time, a complicated and emotionally exhausting journey that lives right on the line between love and obsession. That doesn't mean it's actually good though. It's average at best because the same cycle just keeps repeating itself over and over. The show also never gives you any real sense of how much time is passing between events, which gets even stranger considering the leads don't age or change at all despite supposedly years going by. It's fifteen episodes, forty five minutes each, so it asks fo...

This German coming of age drama tackles a really tricky taboo subject and it's going to split people right down the middle. The film starts off looking exactly like every other teenage countryside romance you've seen before, lush visuals, swimming, bike rides through the country, and then it pulls a twist that completely changes what kind of movie you're watching. It does have shock value going for it, but honestly it didn't manage to hold my attention the whole way through. There are a lot of loose threads and underdeveloped ideas that just get left hanging. In a small German town, Sebastian is living a pretty normal teenage life, sheltered and looked after closely by his parents, sneaking off here and there to drink beers by the lake with friends as his version of rebellion. He has a girlfriend too, though she clearly wants to take things further than he's ready for. He's just a kid trying to work out where he fits in the world. Everything shifts when his fath...

When I came across this documentary I was genuinely curious because I really had no idea what life is like for gay people in the former Yugoslavia region. The film gives Kosovo's homosexual community a platform to speak about their experiences and the discrimination they face, while also bringing in voices from religious leaders, psychologists, analysts and everyday citizens. It came out in 2007 so it's almost 19 years old now and things may well have changed since then, but the whole point of this documentary at the time was to look at the harsh realities of gay life in Kosovo and ask how much longer people should have to stay hidden, living in fear of their own identities. A big chunk of the film is given over to four gay men who sit on stools, silhouetted in shadow to protect who they are, and talk about their feelings, their fears, the humiliations they've faced and what they hope for. There's also a lesbian and a bisexual man. A lot of the story actually gets told ...

Season three picks up right after that season two cliffhanger with Danny and his newly estranged ex Matty both thrown back into the New York City dating pool. Same format, six episodes, about twenty five minutes each. The sharp witty energy that made the first two seasons such a good time felt a little muted here though. The honest observations about middle aged gay life in NYC are still very much there and they still hit, but this season is more about Danny and Matt working through their issues with each other and figuring out if there's anything left worth saving. It also genuinely feels like the show might be wrapping up for good. The biggest change this season is that Matt gets his own moments speaking directly to camera alongside Danny. Season two ended with Matt putting himself out there and asking Danny to be his boyfriend, Danny said no, and now both of them are walking around with a little bitterness about the whole thing. Danny starts seeing someone who's into polyamo...

Burn Bridge (UK) Harry, a typically angst-filled teen, is harboring secret desires for his roguish and perpetually horny straight best friend Jamie. When Jamie starts hooking up with a local girl, jealousy rears its ugly head and his true feelings start inching ever closer toward the light. The film examines those lusty teen infatuations that can be hard to shake. Nice film. Mồ Hôi (Vietnam) [Sweat] On the eve of his departure, Hung, a farm worker, is preparing to cross the border of rural Vietnam in search of refuge abroad. His days have been defined by routine and labour, yet his final day with Hoang, a fellow worker, transforms his understanding of himself and the world around him. The film unveils the multi-faceted nuances and struggles of queerness, displacement, and the nation. I thought it was quite mundane and boring tbh. Photographs (USA) Robby, a photography student, invites his high school friend Greyson to model for his portfolio. Greyson, recently heartbroken, agrees to up...