Movie Reviews -
Gay Themed

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...

Is this technically a gay show? Even after getting through the whole thing, that's still kind of tricky to answer. There's never any physical intimacy shown between the two leads, not even a single kiss. What it gives you instead is something that goes way deeper than that. It traces an emotional bond that spans a full decade between two guys who are both dealing with their own baggage, and what they share basically amounts to being soulmates. The story moves across Japan, South Korea, and Berlin. Honestly, whether people want to call what they have a romantic relationship or not doesn't really matter to me. A relationship doesn't need a label like boyfriends attached to it to actually mean something. And closeness doesn't need to be physical to feel genuine. What this show captures is something quieter but way more powerful, a bond rooted in understanding, respect, and just showing up for each other. Across eight episodes, each running 35 to 45 minutes, this is one...

We've seen this combo before, blending gay romance with a murder mystery is a solid concept on paper, and it usually works fine. Unfortunately, not this time around. The investigation itself is basically a joke, riddled with plot holes everywhere you look. Most of the runtime, the two detectives are more focused on flirting with each other than actually doing their jobs. They can't keep the victims safe and they can't catch the killer either. All their light, romantic back and forth feels completely out of place next to the seriousness the mystery genre demands. This ended up being a total waste of my time, and honestly I wasn't invested in either the romance or figuring out who the killer was. The show runs 10 episodes, each clocking in around 50 minutes. It all starts at a college party where a group of seven friends are playing truth or dare while drinking. They all end up passing out, and when they wake up, one of them is dead. That kicks off a police investigation ...

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...