LGBT+
Joe Muggs
There's something about the partnership of Vince Clarke and Andy Bell that seems to automatically generate sweetness. This collection of half originals and half Christmas classics is really quite dark, quite a bitter look at winter and the Christmas spirit – but somehow, Clarke's fizzing synth work and Bell's ever-distinctive voice give it all a sugar frosting, just like pretty much all of their work.But then that's been their strength and downfall throughout their existence. The longest running of Clarke's musical partnerships, Erasure never seemed to ever quite get the critical kudos of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The bleak opening of Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves is set in a nursing home where a man is dying of AIDS, tended by nurses who themselves know next to nothing of the disease. The phrase one nurse utters as a warning gives this Swedish drama its title: any human contact, even if it’s intended as the smallest act of kindness, risks passing on the infection. Simon Kaijser’s three-part drama will show us the varieties of response across society to these extreme new circumstances.It begins in the Swedish countryside, where Rasmus (Adam Pålsson) has grown up happily, surrounded by loving Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
“The most potent special effect in movies is the human face changing its mind.” So stated film critic David Thomson, and the principle has never been more irrefutably proven than by Blue Is the Warmest Colour and its leading lady Adèle Exarchopoulos. The electric, emotionally raw story of 15-year-old schoolgirl Adèle’s sexual awakening unfolds in a series of languid close-ups and unbroken takes, and her face is centre-stage throughout, captivating both in its moments of beauty and ugliness, continually on the brink of change.Director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose treatment of his cast and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What happens when a citizenry marginalised by society and weakened by an illness that could well be fatal are also called upon to rise up to demand the treatment, not to mention the civility and compassion, that are their due? The answer is on often grievous yet ultimately heartening view in How To Survive A Plague, David France's immensely stirring chronicle of the activism - spawned in New York and then spun out elsewhere - that accompanied the first decade or more of the AIDS crisis. Nominated this year for an Oscar, journalist France's thoroughgoing record of events at first stirs Read more ...
theartsdesk
Following theartsdesk's Monday opinion piece on reasons for moving towards a boycott on Valery Gergiev's concerts, and in the general climate created by other reports and protests, the conductor has issued the following statement, to which David Nice responds with an open letter.Valery Gergiev's statementI am aware of the gay rights protest that took place at the Barbican last week prior to my concert with the LSO. I have said before that I do not discriminate against anyone, gay or otherwise, and never have done, and as head of the Mariinsky Theatre this is our policy. It is wrong to suggest Read more ...
David Nice
Last Thursday I was giving a talk before a concert in Birmingham, decently but not inspiringly conducted by the much-liked Vasily Sinaisky. Had I been in London I could have taken my pick between two greater interpreters, Valery Gergiev launching his Berlioz series with the London Symphony Orchestra and veteran Yury Temirkanov returning to one of his standard programmes with the Philharmonia.Both appeared on the list of 549 "trustees" supporting Vladimir Putin’s 2012 re-election campaign. Temirkanov recently established chauvinist credentials which made the foolish remarks of young Vasily Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With a hero who’s an aspiring actor and an ensemble of theatrical types trapped outside time as supporting cast, the staginess of Ferzan Ozpetek’s A Magnificent Haunting comes as little surprise. It makes for sometimes nicely camp overplaying, though the comedy that made the Turkish-born director’s latest film a hit in his adopted Italy doesn’t travel easily beyond borders. Some elements, including gay traces, transvestite cameos and females at nervous breakdown levels, hint at eccentric sensibilities akin to those of Pedro Almodóvar. But Haunting doesn’t aim to be edgy, settling instead for Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ground-breaking though it is as one of the first gay films to come out of Poland, Tomasz Wasilewski’s Floating Skyscrapers brings home how happy endings on such subjects are hardly to be hoped for in the conservative, Catholic country. Wasilewski’s second feature has real visual style though, with laconic imagery and accomplished performances. It has garnered plentiful festival acclaim already, and opens in the UK in December.It’s set in an anonymous-feeling city of underpasses and motorways, a largely dark world where interiors are cramped, like the flat that Kuba (Mateusz Banasiuk, below Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close to his heart, how gay people are faring in various parts of the world. This first episode took us to Uganda and Los Angeles, while part two on Wednesday drops in on Brazil, Russia and India. Quite an itinerary for two hours of television – fitted in over two years, during gaps in Fry’s other commitments – and it’s to Fergus O’Brien’s directing Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Go for the lesbian sex, leave knowing relationships are all the same: that's the nutshell of French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche's explicit, intimate and lengthy drama Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka Le Vie D’Adèle), the Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Based on Julie Maroh’s 2010 graphic novel of the same name – itself akin to Pierre de Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (famous in French schools for the vivid voice of its female narrator, the unfinished novel is mentioned early in the film), Kechiche’s sympathetic feature stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When piano-playing Vegas sensation and all round American entertainer Liberace (Michael Douglas) finds that his new live-in lover, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), is bisexual, he responds by saying, “Good for you – I wish I could be that flexible.” For these sort of snappy camp comebacks alone, of which the first half of the film contains plenty, Behind the Candelabra is enjoyable enough. What really makes the film, however, is the performances of its two leads.Director Soderbergh lays out a familiar Hollywood tale, that of the wide-eyed ingénue (although gay bar-cruising Thorson is hardly an Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Eleven life stories, and memories stretching back more than half a century. The protagonists of Sebastian Lifshitz’s Les Invisibles (The Invisible Ones) tell their different stories of growing up homosexual in France in years when their sexual identity was far from accepted by society. What a kaleidoscope of experience they have behind them, how moving a perspective they present as they view the lives they have lived from age. This is a film as much about looking back, about le temps perdu, as it is about the ramifications of sexual orientation.Some talk hesitantly, other unstoppably. They Read more ...