Review of Arthur J. Bressan Jr.’s film Juice, which follows a gay photographer who must find new models for a magazine. Light and sexy. With this feature film, Arthur J. Bressan Jr. delivers a lighter, more modest work, immersing us in the daily life of Jim, an adult gay magazine photographer (Michael Christopher, very well endowed by nature)…

Sadly, this series falls into the same trap most GMM shows do. I really wanted it to be good because the premise genuinely had potential. And honestly, it starts out strong: playful, funny, with a fun little love-scam angle running through it. But around episode four or five, it slips back into the same worn-out…

This coming-of-age movie follows two teenage guys who seem completely opposite on paper, even though they’re both carrying baggage from their past. We get to watch them deal with it and fall for each other along the way. It starts off feeling like a teen rom-com, then becomes something much more personal by the end….

How can there be such a dearth of stories that these vertical filmmakers keep recycling the same 5-6 story permutations and combinations, just mixing and matching them? It’s like some old fantasies are being brought to life in these formats. I’m really starting to lose it completely. Then you read all these random, glowing, made-up…

Review of Romas Zabaraukas’s film Standing Tall (The Activist), which immerses us in a film noir-flavoured investigation set against the backdrop of LGBT rights. A political thriller at the heart of LGBT struggles in Lithuania, the film sees Lithuanian director Romas Zabaraukas return after winning us over with the referential, political cinema tinged with homoeroticism of his feature film Falling for Ali. He is back with a story that is even more committed—and rich in nuance…

Review of Pedro Pinho’s film Laughter and the Knife, which follows a bisexual Portuguese engineer on an odyssey in Guinea-Bissau. A contemplative arthouse film poised between immersion and cinematic journey. To say the least, Laughter and the Knife is a film that has to be earned: a contemplative arthouse film (and therefore one that…

Review of the BL series Secret Relationships, which follows a young man caught in a love square involving three very different—and possibly toxic—admirers. Secret Relationships is a Korean BL series centred on a tense love square set in Seoul. Jeong Da-on (Kim Junseo) is a delicate, cute, hardworking boy. Although he comes from a modest family and has an unstable father addicted to gambling, he has managed to build a career through hard work and dedication. He has also found a benevolent patron in the handsome, well-to-do Sin Jae-min (Kim Ho-young), who acts somewhat like a protective big brother, always kind and always there when Da-on needs help. We understand that the young man has a crush on his mentor but hesitates to confess his feelings to him…

A review of Lucas Santa Ana’s film 300 SWEET WORDS (aka “300 letters” / “300cartas”), which plunges us into the heart of a particularly toxic gay breakup. After Bromance and Diary of a Teenager, Argentine director Lucas Santa Ana turns to a breakup film with the deceptive aesthetics of a colourful romantic comedy…

Review of Juan Briseño’s film The Suspended Breath (Seré breve al momento de morir). A tense gay love triangle set in the world of dance. A low-budget Mexican film, The Suspended Breath immerses us in the daily lives of two gay dancers, Sebastián (Martín Saracho) and Arsenio (Joan Kuri). The two young men fall deeply in love. Their whirlwind happiness heals Sebastián’s wounds and calms his self-destructive tendencies. But when a new choreographer, the highly authoritarian and sadistic Mikael (Mikael Lacko), joins their dance company, things become more complicated…

Review of Sam Wineman’s film HAG. A passionate thriller about a gay man and an obsessive female friend who does not wish him entirely well. What would Fatal Attraction look like if its characters were a gay man and a woman obsessed with him? It is not necessarily a question we had asked ourselves, but one that…

A review of Noel Alejandro’s film The Mirror, an original and poetic short film about a gay breakup. Noel Alejandro continues to explore his favourite themes—loss, disappearance, and reality blending with the fantastical when emotions become too heartbreaking—which he intertwines with his cinema of bodies. Since his earliest films, the director has used explicit scenes as a cinematic language in their own right: a climax of the plot, a kind of purgatory between the worlds of the living and the dead, those who remain and those who have left…

Review of Emanuel Parvu’s film Three Kilometres to the End of the World. A poignant portrait of a boy subjected to homophobia in a Romanian village. Although its form is not particularly surprising—with its dry style and documentary precision typical of many “social cinema” films—this feature film has the…