Movie Reviews -
Gay Themed

This mini series was so damn confusing to watch. It's only 5 episodes, each around 20 to 25 minutes, and I could follow the three parallel stories after three episodes, but how they were supposed to fit together lost me completely. I had to go online and read a summary to figure out what it was even about, and honestly, without that, there's no way I would've understood it. Right off the bat, I'd say it's a real problem when the audience can't make sense of what's going on. Three parallel stories play out, and they slowly come together near the end. Back in high school, Cao Dat falls for his classmate Huy but never says a word because he's scared. Another classmate, Hoang Loc, keeps bullying the two of them. Cao Dat gets angry and tells Hoang Loc to quit harassing them and be honest about who he actually likes. Hoang Loc takes that advice and quietly confesses to Huy, and Cao Dat sees it happen. Thinking he's lost his shot, he moves away, while Huy a...

What could have been a decent drama, but this series has a lot of problems, and I'll get to those in a bit. It could've been a proper love story, and technically it is one, but the makers wrote the lead so vulnerable and so delusional that nobody in their right mind can buy what he's doing or agree with it. It's basically a romance between an emotionally open young man and a guy who turns affection into a power game. And guess what, the good guy is the one I'm talking about as the problem here, not the bad guy. Yes, really. It's 10 episodes, each a long 55 minutes. Jimmy's a charming guy who loves flirting with boys, and once he's got one, he moves on to the next. He wants to go after Fah and tries talking to him, but Fah just ignores him. Jimmy's best friend is Teh, whose older brother Toh dreams of running a cafe. When Jimmy meets Toh, he starts flirting with him, and Toh falls completely for him. It turns out Fah and Toh are good friends too, and ...

The starting point of this film proposes an intriguing question: Can music be an instrument of Hate? This is a British indie drama that digs into homophobia, race, and violence inside London's urban and dancehall music scene. JJ's an up and coming MC chasing his music dream and fighting his way toward the Urban Slam finals. He's white and openly gay. After a tense run in with a rival group called The Ilford Illmanics, he ends up in an onstage rap battle against them. Meanwhile his boyfriend Orlando is backstage, where those four guys jump him in a brutal homophobic attack that leaves him with brain damage. The crew gets defended in court by a closeted gay solicitor, the same guy they'd earlier targeted with a homophobic attack in a shop, which is actually how he ended up meeting and falling for a young carer. From there the film follows what happens after the attack and how it hits everyone involved, from the four men's time in prison to JJ, Orlando, and the people ...

Carlos Jauregui is known as the father of the LGBT rights movement in Argentina, and this documentary is built around old television appearances and interviews with the activists who stood around him. The people who knew him personally and worked right next to him give you the context of that whole era. Jáuregui shows up in a lot of the archival footage, so the film works really well as primary source material. It begins in 1984, when Carlos and another man appeared on the cover of a mainstream magazine and outed themselves in public. That cost him his teaching job at the university. But that article, and the ones after it, got people seeing gay folks for the first time and then got them arguing about it. Carlos was loud about who he was and happy to be in the news, and by dragging homosexuality out of the shadows and not being scared to speak up, he won the admiration of the whole community. Everyone who worked with him respected him deeply, and that never faded even after he died far...

This one feels like it was made more for eye candy than anything else. The film is almost 15 years old now, so it might've been one of the earlier ones to touch on a throuple, or at least hint at it. It runs about 75 minutes, which makes it an easy sit, but with tighter editing and fewer repetitive scenes, it could've been a crisp little short film. Rene runs the family business to support his sick grandmother, while his aunt, who looks after her, keeps trying to match him up with different women so he'll finally settle down. The thing is, Rene's gay, and he's in love with his driver. He's way too shy and closed off to ever say it out loud, but one weekend he loosens up on a seaside trip with the guy he's crazy about. That night, after a lot of drinking, they sleep together and Rene finally admits how he feels. Still, he knows the driver has a long term partner he can't leave. Once Rene's had enough, he heads to the driver's house planning to tal...

What I liked most about this series is how tightly it stays on track. No filler, no over the top drama, no random side characters cluttering things up. Ten clean episodes at just 13 minutes each make for a pretty charming, easy watch. That said, the show definitely has its fair share of issues too. For a series built entirely around a physical relationship between two guys, the sex scenes come across as awkwardly shot and pretty cheap looking. The two leads also don't have much chemistry together, so you barely feel any real heat between them. More on that in a bit. Kaji's a top performing salesman at his company, and basically everyone's drawn to him, women want him and men adore him. He's hiding the fact that he's gay and only goes for the most attractive, elite guys for hookups, mostly because he's incredibly full of himself and thinks extremely highly of his own standards. One day work sends him out of town with Fukami, a nerdy guy from the IT department. Ka...

Once I saw this one came from Oxin films, I already knew to keep my expectations pretty low. I figured I'd be getting plenty of skin and sex scenes, with some kind of story buried in there somewhere, dragged out way longer than it needed to be just to pad the runtime. And yeah, I was right on every count. The series runs ten episodes, each around 50 to 55 minutes, and there is an actual plot in there, but it's nowhere near enough to justify ten full episodes. Also, just throwing a ton of characters into the mix doesn't automatically make a show better, at least not for me. Harry and his girlfriend Jasmine broke up three years back, but he's still hung up on her and wants her back. He's caught off guard when she tells him she's found someone new, another woman, and wants to be with her instead. Still not willing to let go, Harry comes up with a plan to make Jasmine jealous by hiring a professional escort named Brix to pretend to be his boyfriend. Predictably, thi...

I'll give it this much, the concept here is genuinely creative. It's about a business executive and a mysterious tribe up in the mountains, where some of the members can produce a natural scent from their own bodies. The whole show is built around how that ties into their love story, their pasts, and a bunch of family secrets. It runs eight episodes, each somewhere between 55 minutes and an hour. Scent has just been named vice president of Kusuma, a well known perfume company, stepping in for his dad who recently had a stroke. He hears about this tribe in the mountains whose people give off a natural scent, so he heads out to find them for the sake of the business. Eventually he reaches them and meets Gaysorn, the tribe's heir, who everyone treats very protectively, especially his grandma. Gaysorn has always been curious about the outside world, partly because his mom went there once and never came back. Scent convinces him to sneak off to the city so they can look for his ...

Went in with zero expectations, but this charming old comedy turned out to be a genuinely fun ride. Combining gay characters, a pride parade, and a heist plot in one movie sounds like a recipe that could easily fall apart, but when it's pulled off right, like it is here, you end up with something that feels satisfying and delivers exactly the kind of simple entertainment it promises. The setting is Chez Nouz, a gay cafe tucked into the heart of Amsterdam, run by an older guy named Adje who acts as a stand in father figure for Bertie, the bar's main drag performer, a guy who never actually knew his real dad and has spent years fantasizing that he might secretly be the son of some famous Dutch singer. Their little makeshift family also includes Babette, the straight waitress, and Rachid, a regular who Adje took under his wing and gave a room to after his own family kicked him out for being gay. The bar's other regulars include Peter-Jan, a good looking gay lawyer, and Gijs, a...

This final season keeps leaning on the same old formula, and once again never actually gives its main character any real sense of closure. Quick refresher, our lead is a university student who spends all his time frantically trying to dodge romance. No matter what he does though, the universe just keeps shoving him into one intimate situation after another. A lot of these setups are lifted straight from classic love story cliches. The whole point is watching him come up with creative ways to escape his fate and avoid falling for another guy. This season's still got six episodes, each around 23 minutes, and every episode features two of these tropey flags that could tip him into a BL storyline. Season three left off with Mob possibly caught in a love triangle between his ex Kikuchi and Hatano, the younger guy who's still a minor. Turns out that was all a dream sequence, but what hasn't changed is that Hatano is still into him. The first four episodes basically run through ev...

After a couple of years off, the creators finally dropped a third season of this show, oddly titled with 2024 in it for some reason I genuinely can't figure out. The story basically picks up right where things left off, following our lead Mobu as he keeps trying to survive inside this whole BL universe, just another character desperately trying not to fall for another guy. Season two left us with his relationship with Kikuchi, and this season kicks off right as Kikuchi heads off to university, which means Mobu's single again and honestly couldn't be happier about it. With six episodes, each running about 23 minutes, this is a quick, easy watch. Now that Mobu's back to being single, he's got to stay alert for every signal or trope that could end up pulling him into another relationship with a guy if he's not careful. So across these episodes, we watch him run into two of these signals per episode through the people around him and how they end up falling for each ...

Outside The Safehouse (India) Journey of Jai who is drawn to Bharatnatyam. His family throws him out but with the right teacher, he learns and becomes sensation. Over his journey he finds love with another man but jealousy soon creeps in and he faces heartbreak when love conflicts with his art. The film highlights resilience, identity, and the unjust societal pressures faced by the LGBTQ community. This film is based on the choices, the voids, and the struggles that the LGBTQ community has to go through on a daily basis. My Quarantine Diary (India) This film depicts a psychological journey of a 37 year old protagonist, a successful designer who returns during the peak of Covid 19 pandemic to his hometown in Assam, India from Paris. He plans to unite and live with his longtime lover. But, following the pandemic regulations, he had to stay confined in a hotel room for days where he recalls their previous conversations and slowly enters into a delusional phase. The film shows how the powe...

This one falls into that darker corner of gay cinema. There was real potential buried in here, but the execution feels so flat that at points it plays out more like a filmed stage play than an actual movie. It's a dark psychological drama built around a street hustler confessing to a brutal, confusing murder of his own lover. Black and white flashback sequences do a solid job laying out the details of what happened, but the real focus stays on the dialogue and the writing itself. Right at the start, a young hustler has already killed his male lover Claude. Three days go by before he calls the police to turn himself in for the murder. But instead of just reporting it somewhere ordinary, he actually summons the police and the local press directly into a judge's private chambers. Yves has keys to the place, which tracks given what he does for a living, but having the press waiting right outside makes the whole scene look like some elaborate blackmail scheme against the judge. The ...

I've always had kind of a love hate relationship with Chinese historical BLs. Some are genuinely excellent, but then there are others that cram in so much plot that keeping track of all the layers of betrayal and scheming gets exhausting, and I end up checking out mentally. Part of the issue is also just how much content is out there in this space, so something really has to stand out to keep me hooked. In this case, the production value is genuinely impressive, top tier stuff, but story wise, I just couldn't bring myself to actually care about these characters. There's a ton of political scheming and backstage manipulation running throughout. Somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, a hostage ends up falling for his own Prince Charming. The show runs eight episodes, each around 50 to 60 minutes long. After spending three years guarding the border, Fifth Prince Yin Qi gets called back to the capital because of a secret letter, only to end up walking straight into a deadly...