Movie Reviews -
Gay Themed

This is pretty much your standard holiday season Christmas movie, just with gay characters in the lead roles. Probably made for TV originally, and honestly I'm not sure how this one slipped past me when it first came out, because if there's one thing I've learned, it's that these kinds of movies really need to be watched while you're actually in a holiday mood. Outside of that window, they tend to feel exaggerated and a bit off. The core idea and plot here were fine enough, but this low budget indie film leaned into some pretty over the top dramatic beats, which, weirdly enough, I kind of saw coming anyway. For the first time in five years, Gary decides to break from his usual pattern and actually head home to Atlanta from Miami to spend Christmas with his family. After telling his mom Rachel, who's always pushing him about family stuff, that he's coming, Gary drops a hint that he won't be arriving solo. Then, right before the trip, the guy he's been...

On the surface this looks like your typical university rivals to lovers setup, and honestly it is, but it's such a beautifully put together story about two guys who are clearly meant to end up together but can't find the nerve to admit it. It really nails that terrifying, electric, heart aching feeling that comes with first love. A lot of that comes down to how naturally it's executed, the strong character work, and a cast that really brings the whole thing to life. This Chinese - Hong Kong co-production runs 8 episodes, each about 35 to 45 minutes. Yu Lei and Chen Ke are our two leads, and their story kicks off when they move into the same dorm at a new university. Chen Ke's an experienced piano player, and the university president, who happens to be Yu Lei's older cousin, pays him extra attention. Both guys are top students, and Yu Lei throws himself into competing with him relentlessly, until he realizes the jealousy he's feeling isn't about his cousin at...

Even though this film is something like 30 years old at this point, so much of it still feels weirdly relevant today. Gay relationships still get messy, people still hide things from each other, couples still carry their own insecurities, and balancing love with sex is still a real struggle. The movie basically follows three couples, or something close to couples, who head out to the countryside together for a weekend. Right from the start we get quick intros to all three pairs. First up are Paul and Ben, together for five years now, though things between them aren't great at the moment. Paul's been on edge lately, especially since losing his brother, and this whole weekend trip is actually meant to celebrate his birthday. Then there's Matt and Owen, who only met three months ago, with Matt already convinced he's found the one and asking Owen to move in with him, while Owen just feels smothered and a little too loved for comfort. And finally there's Will and Adam, w...

This is a low budget, moody gay supernatural horror flick that mixes emotional character work with psychological unease. Horror movies always run on questionable decisions, like why would anyone go wandering around dark corners of a house they have no reason to be in. Same logic applies here, why would you travel out to some isolated family property just because a random guy you met on a gay dating app invited you. Well, you kind of asked for whatever happens next. Albert's a middle aged, married, closeted English teacher, and Devon's a younger paramedic who's built himself a quiet pattern of going after married men who can never fully be his. The two connect on an app, things heat up over messages, and they decide to meet up at Albert's remote family cabin, way out in the middle of nowhere during the off season, just to see what happens between them. They talk, have some drinks, swap stories about their pasts, but something feels a little off to both of them. Separatel...

This 8 part Korean drama runs on one central question about messing with fate. If you had the chance to go back and change how things turned out for someone you love, even knowing there's no guarantee it works out better, would you actually do it? That's basically what this whole show is chewing on, second chances, regrets that just won't let go, and this fragile hope that maybe love can outlast time itself. Each episode clocks in around 30 minutes. There's a fair number of issues with the story, but the leads have enough charm to carry you through it, even if none of it really sticks with you once it's over. In the present, Hye Seong is a painter who's made it. While digging through an old sketchbook to prep for a guest lecture at his old school, he suddenly finds himself pulled back ten years, landing on the exact day he transferred into a new school, trapped in the art room as his teenage self. He's caught off guard at first, but with no way back, he just...

This one's a beautiful, tender, quiet romantic drama with a moody atmosphere, set in a tight knit Welsh fishing community. It's a touching story about a man waking up sexually in the middle of his life, and how he, his family, and everyone around him deal with it, which makes it emotional and sentimental without ever getting over the top. The slow burn plays out against a landscape that's as bleak as it is gorgeous, where quiet, closed off men are stuck inside rigid ideas of what masculinity should be. Some people might be reminded of "God's Own Country," but I think both films are lovely in their own way. Jack is a middle aged guy who co-owns a mussel farm with his rough around the edges brother Dyfan, and the tension between the two of them is simmering under the surface right from the start. Dyfan's three sons all help out with the work, while Jack's sulky teenage son Tom keeps skipping out. Jack's been with his wife since they were both 16, and...

Let's just cut right to it, this show was painfully boring. There, I said it. A story built around partial amnesia has real potential, but between the choppy scene structure and random flashbacks thrown in constantly, the whole plot ends up feeling more tangled than it needed to be. The romance doesn't fare much better either, it's written so poorly that I never really found myself invested in this couple. Both leads come across stiff on screen and deliver their lines in a really awkward way. The show runs 8 episodes, each somewhere around 30 to 35 minutes. Hanuel, a 29 year old language teacher, wakes up after an accident only to realize his memory stops at age 19. It turns out he'd been in another accident back then too, which is why his memories cut off at that point. He has zero recollection of the fact that he's currently living with his childhood friend Saebyeok, who's now a huge celebrity. That makes the whole situation even harder for Hanuel to wrap his ...

This documentary, made by Chase Simmons, brings together eight black gay men from Atlanta who open up about their relationships with their fathers and eventually read letters they've written to them. In the director's own words, he talked about growing up unable to find any media that reflected who he was, and wanting to give black gay men actual faces and stories they could see themselves in and connect with. The whole project came out of watching a former friend go through intense emotional pain because of how his family reacted to finding out he was gay. Same gender loving people are met with a variety of challenges. Same gender loving black men are met with a particularly unique set of social and systematic challenges that impact how we experience life. Arguably a central figure in a young mans rearing is his father, especially young men of color. Add not being heterosexual to the equation and a lot of these young men lose a connection with their father early on and are pus...

This BL was so paper thin and honestly close to unwatchable that I kept wondering why it even got made. From what I've read, it was originally shot as just 4 episodes and then someone decided to rush out 4 more later on for whatever reason. Not that it matters to me either way, as long as the final product actually holds together. The story here has basically nothing to it, this could've easily been condensed into a quick 20 minute short instead of getting stretched out into an 8 episode series with each episode running just 15 minutes. Wei Xing is a famous singer who ends up accidentally kissing a regular guy named Liang Chen on a bridge one night. A year passes, and Wei Xing is scouting models for his fashion label when he spots Liang Chen again and offers him a modeling gig. To everyone's shock, he actually signs him for the contract. Things start rough since Liang Chen's completely green at this, and the team can't figure out why he was chosen, but Wei Xing stic...

The whole Fourever You universe in Thai BL has been expanding quite a bit lately. I liked the original show a good amount, but these spin offs have honestly been hit or miss for me. This particular one's been getting massive praise all over the internet, so I went in expecting to love it too, but turns out I'm apparently the outlier here because I really didn't enjoy it. You know something's wrong when you just stop caring about the main characters, and that's exactly what happened to me watching this. At eight episodes plus a bonus special, with each one running anywhere from 55 to 70 minutes, it's also asking for a serious chunk of your time. The story kicks off when Daotok lands a new condo after scoring an insane 70% discount on rent. The catch is that the building's crawling with restless, noisy spirits who won't stop causing chaos. Since ghosts don't scare Daotok at all, he takes the deal without a second thought. He's an introverted guy wh...

This one's a light, fun musical comedy through and through. I wouldn't exactly call it a gay film in the strict sense, but with so much of it built around drag culture and the way the two main characters end up finding a home for themselves within the LGBT community, it definitely earns a spot as a queer friendly watch. It's not trying to be deep or serious in any way, but purely as entertainment, I had a genuinely good time with it. The plot's pretty straightforward. Connie and Carla have been best friends since they were kids, and now they're struggling singers and performers trying to make it, even though their boyfriends don't seem too thrilled about their dreams. Everything changes when they witness their club boss getting murdered and have to run for their lives. They end up choosing LA as their escape since it's far enough away that the criminals won't be able to track them down. Once they settle in, they stumble into a drag club completely by acc...

There's a lot packed into this show, and it stretches across something like 10 to 12 years of story time. At points it genuinely felt like watching one giant soap opera, though in a good way. It's like two strands of a double helix, once certain lives get tangled together, fate just won't let them fully separate. Across 12 episodes, each about 45 minutes, we follow our two leads through this long journey that moves from friendship into love, then separation, then obsession, and eventually back to love again. It centers on a wealthy heir and a warm hearted top student who get torn apart for a decade, both left scarred by family drama and eventually consumed by this intense, obsessive bond. Lu Feng comes from serious money and falls hard for his classmate Xiao Chen. Xiao Chen's hesitant about it initially but eventually comes around, and the two start a genuinely happy relationship for a while, until things fall apart because of circumstances outside their control. The sh...

This South Korean comedy handles gender dysphoria with a surprising amount of warmth and care. Worth keeping in mind that it's an older film, so it's not really focused on the mechanics of transitioning itself, it's more about someone chasing the freedom to just live as who they truly are. I noticed some comments pointing out that the film skips over the actual transition process, but that's not really what it's trying to be about. It's a comedy about an outsider who stumbles onto something that pushes him one step closer to the life he actually wants. Dong-ku is a teenager who wants to live as a woman. He's stuck at home with a father who drinks heavily and only sees his mom every now and then. Before school he works down at the docks hauling rice just to scrape together some savings. Then, with some help from his oddball best friend, he figures out there's real money to be made by winning the national scholastic sumo championship, so he decides to go f...

Honestly, nobody needs to sit through this thing for the full seven hours it demands. The only way I made it through was accepting early on that it's garbage and just cranking the speed up so I could get it done in under half the runtime. There's basically no story here, it's a total guilty pleasure watch stuffed with wall to wall raunchy sex scenes that the leads clearly had zero hesitation filming. Writing, acting, directing, none of it holds up, and honestly it's baffling that anyone greenlit ten episodes of this running almost an hour each. Makes you wonder what universe the people behind this were living in. The setup follows Po, a guy who freelances designing book covers and spent his younger years kind of unsure about his own sexuality, which led him to porn, specifically clips from a performer called Peach Lover. This guy's whole thing is posting sex tapes online while always staying masked. At some point Peach Lover puts out word that his previous partner i...