When we first lay eyes on him, nineteen-year-old Malik (the ravishingly gorgeous and protean brilliant newcomer Tahar Rahim), bares the scars of the street. Convicted of assaulting a Paris cop – we never learn the circumstances behind this crime – and sentenced to six years in prison, the teenager is tossed into a human inferno – ruled by rival and fiercely antagonistic Arab and Corsican gangs – Malik is ordered to murder another inmate, a fellow North African, who has the hots for him, as the price for being “protected” by the prison’s Corsican don, the white haired and ferociously ornery Cesar (a riveting Niels Arestrup).
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“Marc was held back in pre-school so we went to school together – I had hoped this would give us a fresh start….It was on the day Dad died that Marc found out that I would be his sister.” – Kimberly Reed narrating her astonishingly intimate, brave and at times uncomfortably close-up look at what happens when the gender wars break out inside a rugged ranch family in Big Sky Country, Prodigal Sons  

In the opening episode (1974) of Red Riding – a brilliant crime thriller in three parts from Britain’s Channel 4 -- an arrogant, hard drinking young reporter, Eddie Dunford, thinks he can solve the crime of the century in his little corner of the world, that being the sprawling moors, played out coal mines and grime covered little towns that make up the county of Yorkshire. The crime is a series of mutilation style murders of girls and young women that North county media, including Eddie’s paper, The Yorkshire Post, have promoted as the dastardly work of a fiend named The Yorkshire Ripper.
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While sadly not the full banquet of German language film treasures we’ve come to rely on from the long running Berlin and Beyond Festival, programming wizard Ingrid Eggers has cobbled together an all-day program of new “German Gems” – five films that hint at the thematic depth and acting range of the New German Cinema – February 28^th at the Castro.
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In the first act of Michael Hoffman’s impeccably researched and robustly entertaining tragic comedy on the final days in the life of arguably the nineteenth century’s greatest writer, Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer), an idealistic, if painfully shy young man, Valentin (James McAvoy), arrives at the great man’s country estate expecting to be supported in his vows of pacifism, vegetarianism and most awkwardly celibacy, only to discover that he’s right in the middle of ongoing, less than civil war between Count Leo and his disgruntled wife of forty-eight-years, Countess Sofya Tolstoy – a ferocious Helen Mirren mustering all the sympathy possible for a character who’s given to shouting out such tender endearments as “I’m surrounded by morons!”
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On the heels of Sundance/Slamdance, Jeff Ross serves up our own mini menu of low budget, edgy filmmaking with almost three dozen features screening February 4^th through the 18^th at the Roxie Cinema.
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Half way through an egregious travesty masquerading as hip satire – veteran German director Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done – (playing February 19^th through the 25^th at the Castro) a deranged dilettante, played with a crazy-eyed intensity by the normally reliable Michael Shannon, brings his drama coach (My Own Private Idaho’s Udo Kier) out to an ostrich ranch run by an eccentric uncle (Brad Dourif channeling the rage rant style that has been Dennis Hopper’s signature since Blue Velvet).
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ouis Mellis and David Scinto are famous to a film fans addicted to British mobster movies where the Queen’s English is wielded like a weapon: Gangster Number One, Sexy Beast and now 44 Inch Chest. In two of the films there’s a moment where one of these desperately macho guys will, without warning, launch into a homo inspired tirade designed to one-up everybody within spitting distance.
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Watch out here she comes! Right out of the box a furious Mia – a fifteen-year-old pepper pot of an East London slum girl – marches out the door of the council flat she shares with a young sis, an unrepentant floozy bottle blonde mom and mom’s trophy boyfriend of the week.
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This year the Sundance Film Festival has a new programmer (John Cooper) and a fresh vow of cinema relevance. We’ll see about that but one thing’s for sure the state of Sundance, artistically and financially, has a hell of a lot to do with the treats that will sustain art house maniacs. What follows are my hunches as to what may make it out of Park City and on to screens from forty feet to four inches.
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“You have killed God, sir! Say good riddance to the old bugger. Science is at war with religion and when we win we’ll be rid of those old bishops with their damn everlasting sense of divine retribution. We’ll lose things that are clearly redundant, like the appendix and the male nipple!”
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There’s no way on earth that any higher authority can question the things that make us laugh or cry, or god forbid, both. In a sense all humor, especially the anarchic, non-linear variety involves a willful regression to whatever devilish impulses were nurtured in the garden of childhood. As children we rejoice, laugh and give way to absolutely fiendish delight at virtually every attempt to subvert, suspend and topple the tyranny of adult rules and even the laws of the physical universe that seem to prop up adult authority.
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An epidemic of mysterious and increasingly brutal crimes descends on a small German Protestant farm village in Michael Haneke’s nuanced fable about whether repressive religion and draconian child rearing practices can lay the groundwork for unthinkable evil.
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In possibly the most deceptively slow moving police movie you’ll ever see, a young Romanian vice cop faces a crisis of conscience when pressed by his bosses to bust a college kid for possessing a small amount of hashish.
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Unless you happen to be a diehard fan of the Fox Network’s best kept secret comedy show, Arrested Development, or have a weird trope for watching vintage Canadian kiddy TV, you probably never heard of the Brampton, Ontario born Michael Cera until a certain astonishingly sweet scene popped at the very end of the Judd Apatow produced box office busting teen comedy, Superbad.
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A Single Man: In Tom Ford’s hyper cool take on Christopher Isherwood’s path breaking 1964 novel, a middle-age Englishman, George, wakes up in his stylish LA home heartsick over the recent death of his young lover. Despite discarding significant portions of Isherwood’s George, Ford maintains the novel’s core conceit that taking us through a day in George’s life will reveal the whole of that life in what might be its last day.

In his three edgy comedy/dramas, Canadian born writer/director Jason Reitman has displayed a sure knack for summoning feisty chemistry between characters from different generations. In Thank You for Smoking a brazenly charming tobacco lobbyist gives his teenage son a hands on lesson in political spin-doctoring; in Juno a very pregnant high school girl enables a frustrated adult woman to achieve motherhood while learning how to slip back into a far more innocent role with her own cute-as-pudding track star boyfriend.
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In Broken Embraces, his latest meditation on how a love of movies can shape, enrich and at times perhaps even redeem our lives, Spanish master Pedro Almodovar first shows us a seemingly broken man, a blind man who begins this particular day by buying a newspaper. Harry Caine – even his cinema charged name possesses an intriguing back story – saddles up to a beautiful young woman in the street – who has just popped out of a nearby “modeling” agency. Drinking in her odor, Harry persuades the young woman to return to his flat on the pretext that she read to him from the newspaper.
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It has taken San Francisco based filmmaking partners Scott McGehee (he’s gay) and David Siegel (and he’s not) over fifteen years to turn out four films – their weird 1994 thinking man’s horror debut Suture; their gay kid in trouble with a bathhouse mob boss, who’s saved by his very focused mom, The Deep End; their crack at filming a quality bestseller with a star laden cast, Bee Season; and now (opening Friday at the Roxie) their lovers on the lam New York thriller and just possibly their breakout hit, Uncertainty.
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In the taut, heartbreaking, emotionally truthful new family at war drama from Irish director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot/In America), two brothers, Sam and Tommy Cahill are sitting at a New Mexico ice rink. Sam, has followed their mean drunk of a dad straight into the substitute family of the United States Marine Corps – as we watch him Sam, his boyish countenance haggard from an unnatural weight loss, experienced on a fourth hitch in Afghanistan – is perched close to black sheep brother, Tommy.
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In Tom Ford’s exhilarating take on Christopher Isherwood’s path breaking 1964 novel A Single Man (based on a screenplay co-written with David Scearce), a middle-age Englishman, George (Colin Firth), wakes up in his sunny, very stylish LA home heartsick over the recent and still incomprehensible death of his young lover, Jim (Matthew Goode). Despite discarding significant portions of Isherwood’s George (more on this in a moment) Ford deftly maintains the novel’s core conceit that taking us through a day in George’s life will allow us to see the whole of that life in what might be its last day.
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Movies that get under my skin can drive me to books that spawned them: No Country for Old Men, Revolutionary Road and now Push, a 1996 novel by army brat, performance poet Sapphire.    

On the printed page this overweight black teenager’s existential wail was uncomfortably close to my younger self’s fall into the welfare caste system, brutal or distracted parents, weird food and huge overdoses of the worst kind of TV.
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This lushly filmed Russian River love story will linger with lonely-hearts of all persuasions. Everett -- the risibly fussy and preternaturally boyish Brendan Bradley: in the film his character is aptly described as “twelve going on forty” -- is a young guy trapped in a suffocating marriage to the more than slightly anal Miles (Tad Coughenour).
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If you’re a fan of movies where real men manage to break the taboos about touching, without actually fucking, a tough minded, tendered hearted new film, The Messenger, may be just the ticket.
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In Pop Star on Ice (DocFest/October 25 & 28^th), a startlingly intimate examination of a brilliant and dashingly handsome young queer athlete, who just may be on the verge of winning Olympic gold, we behold our young hero in a series of coy poses.
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In the beginning of the latest and possibly best film in the Coen Brothers’ distinctly weird body of work, A Serious Man, we find ourselves securely lodged inside the head of a thirteen-year-old Jewish pothead. That well-groomed head has a white wire extending out of its ear, the wire running into a small transistor radio from which is emanating a druggie anthem: Darby Slick’s lyrics for The Jefferson Airplane’s first Top 40 hit Somebody to Love.
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I’m not sure why playing Jeffrey Dahmer in what one critic hailed as “a sensitive, non-exploitive serial killer movie,” qualifies Jeremy Renner to play a military bomb disposal expert in the best and perhaps last of the Iraq era war movies, but there you have it. Fans of Kathryn Bigelow’s heart pounding, subversively funny early 90’s surfer bank heist flick Point Break know this gal can handle the guy-land niche of mixing screen gore with a wicked grasp of the genre’s absurd pertinence.
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In Pedro: The True Story of Pedro Zamora, a twenty-two-year-old intensely charismatic, Cuban born AIDS activist learns just how sick he really is during a doctor’s appointment. Unlike most young men getting really bad news Pedro’s dilemma is complicated by the fact that cameras are rolling.
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Kirby Dick has never hesitated to take his camera places where the going gets rough...In Outrage he goes inside a shadowy institution that he argues is one of the most dangerous and least reported in America: the political closet. Beginning with the almost farcical fall from grace of former Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig, after he was caught propositioning a Minnesota state cop in an airport lavatory, Dick ends by tip toeing close to a very powerful door, that of popular Republican Governor Charles Crist, jr.
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The ever shortening window between a great movie’s life on the big screen and the DVD release means that many fans will clutch their copies of Focus Features’ Milk while the bio pic still graces more than 400 screens and is inching past a very respectable $45 million dollar worldwide box office gross, while many still bask in the afterglow of Oscar speeches by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and lead actor Sean Penn.
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This slick package of six shorts bounces geographically: South Florida, East Coast, West Coast, Norway and Brazil with sharply observed stories, director interviews (for four films) and an optional 19-year-old Latin boy host, Oscar Peralta, who is tastefully appealing without stooping to video lap dancing.
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A new series on here! TV – John Roecker's Everything You Wanted to Know About Gay Porn Stars *but were afraid to ask – is an intimate, brave and frequently witty exploration inside the heads of sixteen male erotic video performers, many with well known porn deplumes: Johnny Hazzard, Brad Benton, Nick Capra and Jason Ridge.
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This week at the movies be prepared to lose your heart to a valiant young queer lad who figures out how to turn the tables on his prep school's thuggish rugby boys, with a little assistance from Mr. William Shakespeare. Were the World Mine opens on a kind of mock execution of the sort most of us endured in PE class, the dreaded dodge ball game where all of a sudden it's open warfare on the gay boy. Just as our hero to be, Timothy (the radiantly handsome, multi-talented newcomer Tanner Cohen) is about to be smacked senseless and given a honey of a shiner, the movie freezes on the movie playing within Timothy's about to be battered noggin, a movie where he turns into Shakespeare's sly trickster, Puck, spreading a special kind of fairy dust that will turn everyone it touches into a lover of his own sex.
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It's official, The Boys in the Band has now entered the cannon of great queer art, complete with a Tony Kushner authorized Good Housekeeping seal of approval. That last line is no joke, incidentally, the author of Angels in America provides a witty and incisive testimonial to the proud queer lineage of Crowley's still astonishingly funny and cathartic snapshot or urban gay life just before the dawn of Stonewall.
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In many ways a counter intuitive tale about the mysteries of becoming famous in America, Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon reveals the many improbable ways in which gay male porn stars helped father and advance the gay liberation movement. With witty interviews from porn industry insiders and celebrity Wrangler fans, Jeffrey Schwarz's immensely entertaining doc tells the wildly improbable tale of a little blonde boy who grew up to be a male porn star in order to please his Hollywood producer daddy. It's the story of little Jack Stillman, whose Beverly Hills family had shed its Jewish roots to become good media savvy Episcopalians.
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Painter Julian Schnabel serves up a deft blend of fact and fiction in his screen adaptation of Cuban poet/novelist Renaldo Arenas' frank expose of the persecution of gays in the first two decades of the Cuban Revolution. Schnabel gets an expressive performance from the Spanish heart throb Javier Bardem as Arenas, reinventing the bio-pic genre to depict the rags to rags saga of a resolutely non-conformist writer, who managed to get only one of his eight novels published on his native island and who died of AIDS, in poverty in New York City.
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A big budget Hollywood film that doesn't cue its viewers on when or whether to laugh or cry is rare enough, an all-star film that mixes gay and straight characters like different candles on a cake without stereotyping or pandering is practically unheard of.
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French phenom Francois Ozon discovered a dark little play by the master of domestic Sturm und Drang, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written by a then 19-year-old Fassbinder, the play is an amazingly prophetic look at the Svengali-like lover the adult Fassbinder would become.
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In this age of cheap irony how many filmmakers will risk ridicule by trying to get us to cry over something as out of fashion as a crisis of faith? Antonio Bird's 1994 heartfelt if seriocomic undressing of a guilt-riddled young priest and his shacking up with his housekeeper older mentor – as the men cope with all measure of carnal indulgence in a sooty Liverpool diocese – feels even more spot on since the American Catholic Church's meltdown over wayward priests.
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Happy birthday! This year Gregg Araki's "New Queer Cinema" two lovers on a killing spree fable, The Living End, turns sixteen, but only in the sense that British auteur Ken Loach meant in his 2002 Scottish gang rumble should this be consider a sweet sixteen.
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