Movie Reviews -
Gay Themed

I am really not one for those pretentious art house flicks where the creators try to throw in a million different themes, leaving viewers like me scratching their heads about the actual message, what was supposed to be the central journey, or what the director was attempting to get across in the first place. Don't get me wrong, the mood is undeniably intense since the gloomy plot takes place right after the war in Vietnam, packing in plenty of raw emotional weight, but I genuinely could not tell if the main goal was to tell a queer love story or simply wallow in pure misery. The plot follows two young guys, Viet and Nam, who scrape by doing brutal manual labor deep down inside coal mines. Money is tight, yet they manage to stay happy together as a couple, sneaking away on the job to share secret looks, quick kisses, and the occasional physical encounter in the shadows when nobody is around. Nam lives with his widowed mom, a woman deeply haunted by her late husband who went missing ...

Every couple of months I somehow manage to forget who Todd Verow is and what his track record looks like, and I end up watching one of his films anyway, only to sit there afterward wishing I'd remembered sooner. This one's broken up into 24 chapters, framed as scenes that were supposedly cut, with a title card claiming they were removed for reasons like length, denial, melodrama, believability, dubbing, and sexual content. The story kicks off when Sean, a guy in his thirties, crosses paths with Wolf, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, and there's instant chemistry between them. They head back to Sean's place and dive into an intense, sex heavy relationship. What starts out as just a random encounter gradually turns into something with more weight behind it. Wolf's got a laid back nature and makes extra cash turning tricks on the side, while Sean is the opposite, clingy, chatty, and pretty wound up emotionally. Building anything solid between them turns out to be a ro...

How can there be such a dirth of stories that these vertical filmmakers keep rehashing t he same 5-6 permutations and combinations of story and do some sort of mix and match. It's almost like some old fantasies being brought to life in these formats. I am really starting to completely lose it. And then you read all these random glowing made up reviews online and you wonder if people are watching the same thing that I am. Liam and Noah are stop brothers but not many people know it. Noah's girlfriend actually likes Liam and tris to seduce him. Meanwhile Liam secretly crushes on his stepbrother Noah. Since Liam cant have Noah, he suggests the girl that maybe she should ask Noah for threesome. This is where a drunk Noah shows up against his better judgment and the two finally kiss. Now Noah is also confused as to is he gay and ho can he be attracted to his step brother. The story slowly moves with the two men slowly starting to realize the good points of each other and fall in love...

You could basically sum this one up as a queer neo-noir erotic thriller centered on a closeted cop who openly admits he's a sex addict and slowly spirals out of control over the course of the story. There was a whole era where these sleazy, sweaty, unapologetically trashy films thrived on dangerous attraction, moral gray areas, and characters just making awful choices under a haze of neon lighting. Not this one though, at least not for me. This film misses the mark on a lot of fronts and honestly never grabbed my interest. The biggest reason is that the plot gets so tangled up and confusing that huge chunks of it just don't add up. Aiden's a cop in Sydney fighting hard not to masturbate, since he's dealing with some form of sex addiction and has convinced himself that abstaining makes him both physically stronger and a sharper cop. He takes this so far that at one point in the middle of the film he actually buys himself a chastity cage. He's part of a unit working t...

Things kicked off on a strong note, and those initial episodes had me hooked enough to hope for something genuinely thrilling, but the whole thing slowly fell apart as it went on. There was so much potential in the narrative, yet the creative team failed to deliver. It certainly didn't help that the cast felt flat, robotic, and frankly pretty toxic. I found almost zero spark between the main leads, making a lot of their scenes together feel clunky, rigid, and genuinely awkward to sit through. Spanning 10 episodes that run about 40-45 minutes each, it asks for a pretty major chunk of your time. The story centers on a cold, cocky tennis phenom whose entire livelihood is on the line due to a severe injury, and his bad attitude is matched only by his constant state of misery. On the flip side, you have a kind yet overwhelmed physical therapist who is drowning in massive debt because his brother got gravely sick, which leaves him constantly hounded by loan sharks. Out of pure desperatio...

Nobody in this movie actually gets a proper name. Apparently, the creators wanted to make sexuality seem normal and strip away all the labels, though I have no clue what they were trying to accomplish with that idea. It plays out as this quiet, low-budget suspense piece with hardly any talking. To me, the whole thing felt like a messy mix of a grim suspense flick and a queer romance blossoming under weird circumstances, which really fell flat in my book. They just didn't set up the foundations properly, opting instead to pad the runtime with long, drawn out moments that should have been used to flesh out the plot. The plot kicks off with a nameless guy leaving his house to set up camp out in the desert, seemingly haunted by thoughts of his former partner. After getting ambushed during the night by some unseen force, a guy and a woman rescue him and take care of his injuries. The problem is, their farm feels like it exists totally outside the normal flow of time. It becomes obvious ...

Honestly I don't even know where to begin with this one. Going in, I figured this would be a solid BL wrapped around a murder mystery, and that part actually was true, but the logic just completely checks out at some point, so by the time everything gets revealed you're left saying what, not because it's shocking but because it's genuinely that dumb. The worst part is our main character supposedly has memory loss and can only recall the last ten years of his life, which is fine on its own, except then why does he need some stranger to mail him a diary to jog his memory about the past? The whole thing just felt way too random. This one runs ten episodes at about fifty minutes each. The title comes from the fact that there is this specific melody that both hypnotizes and brings memories back to Botpleng, but has actually no relevance. Our lead is Botpleng, a crime journalist who only remembers the last decade of his life, and his mom's currently in a coma. Out of nowh...

This is the second vertical AI BL drama I've sat through, and honestly I went in knowing better. I had it on while I was doing cardio at the gym, and what struck me was just how much the plot echoed the last one I watched. Same step brother romance angle, same mystery girlfriend showing up near the end, same extra guy pining after one of the leads. Genuinely the only thing going for it was the runtime, the whole thing wrapped up in forty five minutes flat.  The setup kicks off with Finn moving schools because his mom just married into money. He finds out his new step brother Aiden goes to the same place, and he's warned to keep his distance from him. Their first run in at school is rocky, just like you'd expect, but there's this odd pull between them neither can shake off. Finn keeps telling himself not to read into it because Aiden's straight and openly homophobic. Things shift when some kids start bullying Finn and the student council president, Ryan, steps in to ...

Watching my first fully AI-generated vertical BL was a genuinely strange experience and I am still not sure how to feel about it. Short AI-generated clips are one thing, but sitting through something feature-length built entirely this way felt different in a way I cannot quite put into words. Whether I keep going down this road or quietly back away from it is a question I have not answered yet, my head and my gut are pulling in different directions on this one. What I can say is that for something made by an AI with presumably no limits on what story it could tell, the choice to lean on the exact same worn-out tropes this genre has been recycling forever is a real letdown. And on top of that, the whole thing carries a very obvious hangover from Heated Rivalry. Adam and James are hockey rivals who genuinely cannot stand each other, until a shared punishment somehow ends with them hooking up, which catches them both completely off guard. If that was not already a lot to process, they the...

If you've been following along with these Japanese Pink films, you already know the deal. An hour of simulated gay sex, a little story baked in, and a premise that's completely ridiculous but somehow keeps you watching. This one goes all in on the body swap fantasy, basically asking the question, what if you woke up one day inside your hot friend's body and could finally act out everything you've been keeping to yourself? Atsushi is gay and has been quietly carrying a crush on his childhood friend Yuma for years. They fell out of touch but end up back in each other's lives when they wind up at the same company. Yuma is straight and has a girlfriend, though things between them aren't exactly great. Then one day, after some kind of signing strike, the two men swap bodies, and suddenly Yuma is walking around in Atsushi's skin and Atsushi is living inside the guy he's been fantasizing about forever. Atsushi wastes zero time taking full advantage, fooling aro...

This one is hard to categorize and honestly that's both its biggest ambition and its biggest problem. It's this wildly eccentric psychosexual comedy that tries to carve out a whole new genre and I genuinely can't think of anything quite like it. But trying to be audacious and actually pulling it off are two very different things and for me personally it just didn't land. And just to set expectations, this isn't strictly a gay film. One of the two lead characters is gay and yes sexuality is very much part of the conversation, but that's about as far as the queer angle goes. Joey and Craig are roommates and their dynamic is warm but also a little uneven. He pays the rent and she doesn't, which means he gets away with things like asking Joey to stay in her room with the lights off when his Grindr date comes over because he's told the guy he lives alone. The film opens with Joey sitting with her therapist recounting this long winding story about how she met ...

Season 2 picks up right where the first one left off, staying focused on LGBTQI+ pioneers, changemakers, and the broader rainbow community in New Zealand. It keeps shining a light on diverse voices from Aotearoa, including gay Māori men, and runs for 6 episodes of about 26 minutes each. The season kicks off with community activator and actor Grayson Goffe heading over to Australia to be part of the 50 years of world gay pride celebrations in Sydney. He spends time with First Nation leaders and meets trailblazers from the world of stage and screen, drag queens included. Episode 2 keeps us in Sydney where Grayson attends his very first Mardi Gras, connects with First Nation icon Crystal Love, and marches across the Sydney Harbour Bridge alongside tens of thousands of people celebrating 50 years of queer liberation. Episode 3 shifts gears and introduces us to actress and presenter Aroha Newby and her partner Pooja who are hoping to start a family. Since there's very little information...

Sometimes even the best intentions and a concept that looks perfect on paper don't actually turn into a good movie. This is an independent film that puts a spotlight on Australian Sign Language, or Auslan, and builds its main plot around a character who stutters and another who's deaf. It's meant to be this big story about love, betrayal, and finding redemption, specifically dealing with what it's like to try and fit into a society that's so quick to point out how people are different. Unfortunately, the way it was put together is so rough that it feels like you're watching 1980s television—and not even the good stuff, but a soap opera where every single scene just drags on for eternity. This thing desperately needed someone to go in with a pair of scissors and tighten up the editing. Since it runs for about two hours and twenty minutes, most people are probably going to lose interest before they even hit the one-hour mark. The story follows Reuben, a guy who re...

I’ve got to be honest, if I’d caught this documentary right when it dropped back in 2011, I probably would’ve felt a lot differently about it. But looking at it now, it hasn’t aged well at all. The whole thing is built on the history of Section 377, that old law from 1860 under British rule that made same-sex acts illegal by calling them "against the order of nature." Back on July 2nd, 2009, the Delhi High Court finally scrapped that clause in a huge landmark ruling, which was basically the biggest win the Indian LGBTQ community could’ve asked for at the time. This film uses that massive moment as its backdrop to introduce us to the lives of its three main subjects. The doc follows three people: a gay man, a lesbian, and a transgender woman. Their stories all hit pretty similar notes—they talk about the terror of trying to accept their feelings while growing up and the struggle of eventually facing those fears to find some peace. We listen to the trans woman explain how she s...

I gotta say, this story actually kicked off on a decent note—even though I’ve definitely seen something super similar before about a guy traveling back in time. But man, it didn't take long for it to just turn into your typical, cliché high school love story. It hits every single BL trope that’s been done to death over the years. You're basically expected to just throw logic out the window for everything that happens, but honestly, even if you manage to do that, the storytelling is just so mundane, boring, and unoriginal. It’s ten episodes long, and each one runs about 45 to 50 minutes. So, the plot follows Win, a young student who’s trying to put together a high school band. He ends up falling for Nut, the guitar player. But here's the twist: Nut has a brain tumor, and neither the band nor his parents have any clue. He somehow talks his doctor into keeping it a secret, promising he’ll come clean right after the band's big competition, because winning one of those has a...

Ugh, my obsession with these vertical dramas just never ends. I honestly love to hate on these micro-shows, but secretly I can’t stop watching them because they just keep getting pumped out. They almost always follow the exact same formula I’ve complained about before: you’ve got a mafia boss, a "straight" guy who won't stop insisting he isn't gay, a villainous woman, a few shootouts, and a happy ending where everything is magically fixed. This one doesn't break the mold at all. The story kicks off with a mafia boss named Sable getting shot while he's on the run. He gets patched up by a doctor named Daymond, who notices a specific ring on Sable’s finger and suspects this is the man who murdered his father during a cartel bust. It turns out Sable runs a gambling casino, and Daymond’s younger brother has racked up a massive debt there. Sable offers to wipe the slate clean if Daymond agrees to be his live-in personal doctor. It’s pretty obvious that Sable is tota...

The summary of the film says "A stone-broke gay actor and a privileged fuck up with a failing business cross paths on a winter night and join forces in a quest around London to find a meaning to their miserable lives, but when their unlikely connection turns into something deeper, fears and demons from their past come to jeopardize the whole mission." I thought this sounds interesting and should be a good watch, but oh man! was I disappointed! The execution of the film is so bland and uninteresting, it just feels like it's going nowhere.  Brash and cocky, Oliver enters an empty bar asking if someone could buy him a pint? Sitting at the bar nursing his beer is Lukas, who wants none of the entitled fratboy energy this loser is giving off. What Oliver doesn't know is that before he ended up drinking alone on Christmas, Lukas came dreadfully close to jumping off a bridge (which we find out much later). The two men happen to meet again in a bus a short while later. Oliver ...

This vertical mini series, stitched as a film was visually nice to watch, but I have to say that the stories are getting hard to believe now. It's like, anything is going on and as an audience you are supposed to believe it. This was one of the first ones where I was rolling my eyes more often. This latest mini series from DramaWave app going into the familiar genre of BL mafia. At a high-society party, Selena and Emma were targeted for revenge by an ex-boyfriend and found themselves in danger. Their respective bodyguards, Noah and Carson, worked together to save them, but Noah got injured in the process. Selena then demanded that Emma send Carson to serve at her house for three months as compensation. What neither of them knows is that Noah was saved by Carson many years back and since then Noah has harbored a secret crush on Carson and loves him. Carson works for Emma's brother Arthur Hill, who agrees to the 3 month arrangement because he wants to know the real identity of a ...

Watching this Korean film was like watching those Japanese Pink films with thin paper plot and 70% sex scenes, just in Korean setting this time. Soft porn for all practical purposes. Every single time I end up watching one of these, I am so pissed at having wasted my time and I wish someone told me to just ignore it.  The film starts with a photographer dreaming of sex with a guy he doesn't know. Th next day when his assistant is showing him the pictures of her boyfriend Gi-joon, he is surprised to see that the guy is the same who came in his dreams. He somehow convinces assistant to send him for a photoshoot. Gi-joon really doesn't want to go and clearly is very uncomfortable with the idea of being a model but he gives in. The photographer slowly seduces him during the photo shoot and next thing you know is they are kissing and having sex and an affair starts. Gi-joon is completely in love now with photographer but he was just playing I guess and he strongly recommends that he...

Set in mid 90s, this film set in Boston, follows a thirty-year-old gay man who attempts to get his life in order while living with his actress mother. It is a simple coming of age drama, that probably was quite novel for its time back in 96. The story itself is simple, with not much happening and a lot of it can just be watched fast forwarding quite a bit of content, because most of it is around our lead hanging out with queer artists and there is not much from a plot perspective. Rejected by numerous art schools and lacking romantic prospects, gay guy Andrew's life is going nowhere. He still stays home with his theatre actress mother. HIs close friend is his uncle, an artist and a confidant and is also gay. His closest friend is Lucy who works in the art studio with him and is lesbian but constantly bickers with her girlfriend. Andrew decides to enter a contest in hopes of winning a six month stay in Kenya. But neither of his family thinks it's a good idea. He find out about h...