Movie Reviews -
Gay Themed

Just Not Naked Enough (USA) On the morning of their shared birthday, Alex and David-married but quietly separated-reunite at the Los Angeles home they once shared. Their polite poolside conversation slowly reveals the fractures beneath their marriage: depression, sexual estrangement, professional imbalance, and unresolved betrayal. As the tension rises, a small but devastating detail emerges-a stranger's watch discovered beside their bed-forcing them to confront the truth about infidelity and the emotional distance that has grown between them. Over the course of a single morning, the couple must decide whether pride and resentment will finally pull them apart, or whether they are willing to become emotionally "naked enough" to fight for their relationship. IUS Del Tiempo (Spain) [IUS of Time] In a remote village in northern Spain, a young photography student arrives to reconnect with his roots and meets Xuan, an aging cheesemaker weighed down by long‑standing rumors about...

Strip away everything and what you have here is a very simple Japanese love story, no surprises, no curveballs, nothing that is going to catch you off guard. The whole thing is asking you to slow down and just sit with two people as their feelings quietly take shape over time. Friends becoming lovers is nothing new, but this series takes the single question of whether risking a friendship is worth it and somehow stretches that across ten full episodes of 24 minutes each, plus a bonus episode following them after they finally move in together. The leads are genuinely charming, I will say that, but my patience did start wearing thin and I will get into that. Minato and Wataru first become close in high school, bonded over photography, and that friendship only gets deeper as the years go on. Minato is the quieter one, takes a while to let people in, but Wataru has always made sure he never feels like an outsider. By university they decide to live together as roommates, and sharing a space...

Its been a while since I saw a film set during Pandemic days, and this one pulled me right back into that strange bubble of time that somehow already feels like it happened in another life. A Brazilian filmmaker who also wrote the script and plays the lead character Chico puts you straight back into that headspace, the endless indoor days, the isolation, the Zoom calls, the social distancing that started to feel like the new normal. The problem is the film itself is genuinely dull. Whatever point the director was trying to make could have landed perfectly in a short film, but instead everything gets pulled and stretched into long scenes of pretty much nothing happening. Chico is a bear living alone through lockdown, watering his plants, following along to workout videos, and treating covid protocols like they are basically sacred law. His friends have actually started calling him the protocol police, and that rigidity has slowly pushed them all away from him. A Zoom call brings more ba...

Wrapping up the MuTeLuv anthology, this is the second of the only two BL stories out of the eight in the series, and the one I am covering last. Four episodes, roughly 45 to 50 minutes each, and it is another enemies to lovers setup, but one that keeps things genuinely light and leans hard into comedy. It works for what it is, though I do think some tighter editing could have made it even sharper. Tum becomes the leader of the Nuea-in gang after making a superstitious vow that if he got the position, he would visit nine temples. He never follows through on that, and his luck takes a nosedive because of it. He keeps getting beaten by the rival gang, led by Oh, who has made a name for himself by snatching the badge off every gang leader he defeats and stitching all the insignias onto his pants. When Tum's friend points out that the broken vow is probably behind all the bad luck, Tum decides to finally go on that nine-temple merit-making trip. The twist is that Oh is out there doing t...

MuTeLuv is an anthology series built around people turning to supernatural forces to get what they want, with love finding its way into each of those journeys. Out of the full series, only two stories have gay plotlines, and those are the ones I watched and am writing about here. This particular story runs four episodes, each around 45 minutes. The first story is called "Hi" By My Luck, and it centers on Err, a high school kid who is basically the academic golden boy, top of his class, winning olympiads, stacking up achievements. Then Mawin transfers in and quietly, without even trying, starts threatening everything Err has built his identity around. Err calls him the dark horse, and the fact that this calm, reserved new kid is effortlessly brilliant drives Err absolutely crazy without Mawin even being aware of it. A major scholarship exam is coming up, one that could send the winner abroad to study, and Err is not about to let that slip away. His friend tips him off about an...

Thai BL as a genre rarely ventures too far from its comfort zone, so stumbling onto one that throws horror, folklore, black magic and a full-blown murder mystery into the mix was genuinely unexpected. What surprised me even more was my own reaction to it, because I found myself completely pulled into the thriller side of things, and at certain points the BL moments actually felt like they were getting in the way of an otherwise tight and well-constructed mystery. That is not something I ever thought I would say, considering I usually complain when shows like this skimp on the romance. Thirteen episodes, about 50 minutes each, and every single one carries weight and has something real to offer. The show opens on blood and gore and closes on kisses and starlight, and everything sitting between those two ends includes suspense, guilt, black magic, heartbreak, the messy business of not being over your ex, and even a hometown trip taken with a brand new boyfriend. The series kicks off at a ...

Seven decades after his grandfather fled Nazi Germany and built a new life in Palestine, Israeli documentary filmmaker Tomer Heymann finds himself heading back to Germany to screen his earlier film Paper Dolls at the Berlin International Film Festival. That trip is where he runs into Andreas, a German dancer, and what starts as a 48-hour whirlwind turns into something much bigger between the two of them. Alongside that relationship, the documentary also weaves in the story of Tomer's mother and what is happening in her life during all of this. Two things sit at the center of this documentary, Tomer's bond with his mother Noa, and his growing relationship with Andreas. Noa is struggling with the fact that one by one her children have packed up and left the country she and her family dedicated themselves to building, and Tomer is the only one still around after his parents split. That makes her grip on his life tighter than he probably wants. On the other side, when Andreas event...

Male bonding dramas keep trickling in, and this one sits comfortably in that space, two guys, one straight and one gay, getting thrown into each other's lives through a shared loss. The idea behind it is genuinely good. Unfortunately the film fumbles it. Nothing really gets explained properly at the start, nothing gets resolved properly at the end, and a bunch of side characters and storylines keep grabbing attention that belonged to the two leads. Some more digging into the characters' histories would have gone a long way. Kenneth has just died, and his estranged son Martin comes back to the family home in Cape Cod all the way from New York. They had not been in contact for years. What Martin did not know was that after his mother passed, his father came out and had been in a relationship with his gardener, Ted, who is now left behind grieving alone. These two strangers, one the son, one the partner, have to sit across from each other and figure out funeral arrangements and wh...

Short form creators clearly took notes when Heated Rivalry blew up, because gay athlete love stories are now becoming their own little genre. More are coming, you can feel it. This one jumps straight into the aftermath, picking up Donovan and Kaden's relationship right after everything went public at the end of the first series. Things are good between them when the show kicks off, and on top of that, Donovan gets his NFL draft call. But instead of celebrating, he is ready to walk away from the whole thing because going pro means hiding who he is, and he refuses to do that to Kaden. His mom pulls Kaden aside and basically tells him to get out of his own way, so Kaden does the heartbreaking thing, makes up a fake new relationship and pushes Donovan out of his life so the man can actually live his dream. Jump ahead three years and Kaden is close to finishing his degree while also interning at an NFL agency that has its eyes on signing Donovan. Donovan walks in and asks for Kaden by n...

Vertical BLs, mostly coming out of the US, are absolutely everywhere right now, and honestly it is only a matter of time before AI-generated versions start flooding in too. But until that nightmare arrives, I will keep watching these guilty pleasures, eyes rolling the entire time, rating them low because nothing really changes between any of them, and yet somehow I cannot stop. That is just my life at this point. The two leads here are Donovan and Kaden. Kaden is the openly gay, twink-coded student body president, and Donovan is your textbook straight macho quarterback. Kaden has a thing for Donovan, but Donovan treats him just like most of the school does, which is to say he bullies and mocks him. Things escalate during budget planning when Kaden does not allocate enough funds to the football team, which only makes the bullying worse. When a prank Kaden pulls backfires, he ends up assigned as the football team's water boy as punishment. This is where Donovan starts secretly flirti...

From the very first minute, this show makes it crystal clear that you are not meant to take any of it seriously. It is a bizarre little sci-fi comedy, a Korean-Thai BL collaboration, about an alien prince who crash-lands right into a struggling bakery. These kinds of joint productions are usually trying to tick boxes for audiences in both countries at once, and this one is no different. Eight episodes, about 25 minutes each, and the whole thing somehow still feels undercooked. The production quality is surprisingly weak for a collaboration of this kind, the editing feels awkwardly stitched together, and while the whole palette screams goofy sci-fi fun, the series never actually manages to pull that off. Wooju is a young guy trying to get his late father's bakery back on its feet, except he genuinely cannot bake to save his life. One night a spaceship comes crashing down right on top of the place. Out of the wreckage come two aliens, a prince named Raon and his loyal canine servant ...

This one isn't your typical BL. It's more of a mature, grounded story about two men finding their way to each other through quiet moments and everyday conversations, think slice of life, not melodrama. It leans into the weight of adult life in Japan, where social pressure and the expectations placed on people are genuinely heavy things to carry. I had been looking forward to this one quite a bit, and honestly, it delivers on what it sets out to do. That said, I felt like the transitions between episodes could've been a little smoother, though that might just be a me thing. The series runs 10 episodes, each around 25 minutes. The story follows two men in their forties who used to work at the same company, lost touch, and then crossed paths again years later in the most unexpected way. Azuma was working as a medical representative but had completely checked out mentally and eventually just quit with nothing lined up. With nowhere else to go, he moves in with his sister and he...

Hard Shift is a fast paced vertical mini-series on the NetShort app that throws medical drama and emotional chaos together. A composed urologist starts losing his cool the moment a rebellious race car driver walks into his clinic, and from there it's a push and pull between professional boundaries and personal feelings, desire fighting against reason. Different setting, same tropes, very much still the vertical BL world you already know. Liam Summers is a famous race car driver and heir to a wealthy family who shows up at Dr Jasper's urology clinic with erection problems. Jasper is immediately attracted to him, examines him, and suggests the issue might be connected to racing stress or possibly the fact that Liam might actually be into men rather than women. Liam tests the theory by trying gay porn, which does nothing for him, so he downloads an app to meet a guy and see if that gets him anywhere. In a very convenient twist, Dr Jasper happens to be staying at the same hotel whe...

This series was made in partnership with Thailand's Ministry of Culture and centers on Khon, the traditional Thai dance form rooted in a traditional epic and recognized on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage. The show itself doesn't really get into the technical details of the dance, but it does a really nice job weaving together a past and present timeline, using the same cast across both, to show how Khon has mattered across different eras. Eight episodes, around twenty five minutes each. The past timeline centers on a noble family where both brothers train in Khon, and a commoner who attends school alongside the elder brother. Dance ends up taking a backseat though, because the elder brother falls for a female servant while the younger brother starts getting close to the commoner boy. Both of them know full well that it's not just the fact that they're two men together causing problems, it's also the class divide standing in their way. There's a...