Tag: gay

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London Korean
Film Festival
(LKFF)
2025

LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 runs in cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th

The London Korean Film Festival, now celebrating its 20th year, kicks off tonight with its Opening Gala, a World Premiere of Frosted Window (Kim Jong-Kwan, 2025), followed by a Q&A with director Kim and actor Yeon Woo-jin.

It bows out in two weeks time with its Closing Gala, Harbin (Woo Min-ho, 2024), starring Hyun Bin, with cinematography by Hong Kyeong-pyo who shot Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, 2019).

In between these two events comes a Special Screening of Hi-Five, a superhero comedy by Kang Hyoung-chul (Swing Kids, 2018; Sunny, 2011).

Also, this year the Festival launches its first-ever LKFF Audience Award, giving festival-goers the chance to vote for their favourite film and help shape this 20th anniversary edition. Of the four films made available to press in advance, my vote would go to the enigmatically titled 3670 (Park Joon-ho, 2025), a compelling drama about a gay man who has defected from North to South Korea. The film, which picked up four awards at the 26th Jeonju International Film Festival, transcends Korean, gay and religious demographics to speak to a much wider audience, and in this writer’s opinion deserves a proper UK release.… Read the rest

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3670
(3670)

Director – Park Joon-ho – 2025 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

A gay man who has defected from North to South Korea must get to grips with Seoul’s gay scene and his own sexual and religious identity – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 which runs in cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th

Sexually active, gay Seoul resident Cheol-jun (Cho You-hyun) grapples with the fact that his partners don’t stick around after physical interaction. Cheol-jun has recently escaped from North to South Korea. He works at a local store counter and attends a class to help defectors adapt to their new way of life. After class, rather than hang out with fellow defectors such as Hak-min (Jeon Du-sik), who is trying to pair him off with pretty class girl Ji-ye (Choi Yun-seol), he follows phone directions to a mixer, a club night to help gay men make friends.

Numbers are assigned. Asked why he is dressed so formally – is he from North Korea, or something – he responds candidly, “I am.” After drinking “love shots” – two men drink with arms intertwined – guests are invited to write “love notes” to the number they fancy.… Read the rest

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Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen
Michelangelo
Love and Death

Director – David Bickerstaff – 2017 – UK – Cert. U – 91m

*****

Sixteenth Century Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo remains one of the greatest artists of all time, yet his overreaching ambition frequently proved his undoing – back out in UK cinemas to tie in with the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth from Tuesday, May 20th

“From a fountain of mercy… my suffering is born.” These words (voiced by James Faulkner as Michelangelo) accompany images of a present day sculptor (Marco Ambrosini) working away at a piece of marble in his studio. The writings of Vasari (voice: Lawrence Kennedy) take up the story. A boy was born to a noble family in 1475. Art Critic and Author Jonathan Jones places Michelangelo among the greats, like Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Picasso. He deals with the strangest, darkest and most difficult stuff. He is the original famous artist. He had two biographies written about him in his lifetime, and took great interest in them, helping bring them to fruition. He painted, sculpted, built architecture, wrote poetry, even built military fortifications. This was the time when artists started being regarded as creative geniuses, according to Art Historian Jennifer Sliwka. Vasari referred to Michelangelo and his art in terms of Divinity and then the Divine.… Read the rest

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Blue
is the Warmest Colour
(La Vie d’Adèle)

Director – Abdellatif Kechiche – 2013 – France – Cert. 18 – 180m

UK release date 22/11/2013;

Review originally published in Third Way magazine, November 2013.

A loose adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Le Bleu est une Couleur Chaude, this is one of the most touching films about romantic love (and physical passion) ever. Be warned, it contains some pretty explicit, real rather than simulated, sex scenes (there’s good reason for the 18 certificate) but these appear in a wider, character-driven context.

Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and her mainly girl peer group at school spend much time discussing boys. She sleeps with but feels no real connection to a boy who’s a “sure thing”. While this romance is going nowhere, she exchanges glances with an unknown blue-haired girl on the arm of another woman on the street and is completely smitten. Seeing her emotional turmoil, she’s dragged off for a drink by her confidant, a boy she’s unaware is gay until they’re together in a gay bar, from which she makes her excuses and somehow winds up alone in an all-girl bar where Emma (Léa Seydoux), the girl with blue hair, chats her up. From there, to the confusion of her straight peers, a relationship slowly blossoms into full-blown passion.… Read the rest

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Streets of Glória
(Ruas da Glória)

Director – Felipe Sholl – 2024 – Brazil – 103m

****

A man mourning his late grandmother but estranged from the rest of his family embarks on a gay relationship with an escort – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Gabriel (Caio Macedo) arrives in Rio de Janeiro with his late grandmother’s ashes in a box. He is not short of money, and rents a hotel room. He wanders around during the day talking to his grandmother, who he clearly misses a great deal. At night, he finds a club named Glória, fronted by an area with tables where style queen Monica (Diva Menner) hangs out with her small entourage of friends. She explains she is the owner. Further inside is the dance floor where he spots Adriano (Alejandro Claveaux) and attempts but fails to pick him up, instead spending the night with another man.

However, a spark has been lit, and the next night Gabriel is more successful. He and Adriano embark on a passionate relationship. Adriano is an escort, and shows Gabriel the park benches where escorts pick up clients; he takes servicing his male clients in his stride, occasionally persuading the hesitant Gabriel to join him in a paying threesome.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Escape
(Talju,
탈주)

Director – Lee Jong-Pil – 2024 – South Korea – LEAFF Cert. 18 – 94m

*****

An army sergeant is caught attempting to escape from North to South Korea, but then a second chance presents itself – played as the Opening Gala at the 2024 London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) which runs from Wednesday, October 23rd to Sunday, November 3rd

North Korea. Sgt. Lim Kyu-nam (Lee Je-hoon) is stationed at the edge of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating North from South Korea, a smart but frustrated soldier who knows he’s never going to rise up the chain of command riddled as it is with nepotism and privilege. Nights, when the rest of his unit is asleep, and inspired by his treasured book of the explorer Edmund Amundsen, he sneaks out of the barracks to map a section of the minefield in the DMZ.

His plan is to escape through that minefield and reach South Korea to defect before the monsoon arrives in four days time and the water moves all the mines around, making his map useless. Then he learns that the bad weather is coming two days earlier than expected. So he must move the date of his escape forward.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Critic

Director – Anand Tucker – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 101m

The first four fifths of The Critic *****

The final fifth of The Critic *

In the 1930s, a London theatre critic, a flamboyant homosexual known for destroying careers with his acerbic prose, finds his job under threat from his newspaper’s new proprietor – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 13th

This originally played in the Toronto Film Festival in a 95m version, only to be acquired for UK release on the proviso that an ‘unsatisfactory’ ending be changed by way of reshoots involving the director, the screenwriter (Patrick Marber), and key cast members. So this current cinema release is the version with the ending changed, and this writer found that new ending less than satisfactory. Which is a pity, because up to about the last twenty minutes, the film impresses.

Now, one could construct a review narrative which says that the original ending must have worked better, and the film has been ruined by its UK distributor. It’s possible that that is indeed the case. However, not having seen that first cut, it is equally possible that the original ending had severe problems which this new version has attempted to fix, even if that doesn’t seem to have entirely worked, and that this new version is an improvement.… Read the rest

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All of Us Strangers

Director – Andrew Haigh – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 105m

*****

A gay Londoner travels by train to visit his parents in Sanderstead, following their deaths in a car crash when he was 12 years old – out on digital from Tuesday, March 12th

He (Andrew Scott) lives alone in a London tower block. Not only is he the single occupant of his flat, there’s almost no-one else in the building. When he goes outside for a breath of fresh air, he sees a guy in the window of one of the other apartments. Later, there’s a knock at his door. It’s the guy (Paul Mescal), who is slightly drunk, comes on strong and tries to get himself invited in. The visitor’s name is Harry. The occupant introduces himself as Adam, but doesn’t let Harry in.

By day, Adam writes screenplays. But he’s got stuck, so after perusing some personal effects, he takes the train to Sanderstead. There, he watches a boy in a window. He follows a man across an area of parkland. Coming out of a shop, the man spots him and asks him to come over. You think it might be a pickup – but no, it’s his dad (Jamie Bell).… Read the rest

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American Fiction

Director – Cord Jefferson – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 117m

*****

A black, American college Literature professor, unexpectedly finds celebrity via an anonymous alter-ego when he writes a cliché-ridden book about ‘the black experience’ – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 2nd

College professor Thelonius ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a black academic at a white university. He teaches literature. While he’s teaching a class on the literature of the American South, a young, white, female student objects to the “N-word”, walks out of the class, and – in due course – gets him put on an unpaid Sabbatical. He’s a published novelist who hasn’t had anything published for years, including a manuscript currently doing the rounds through his agent Arthur, whereas other, white, faculty members publish work he considers beneath him yet which also sell in volume in airports.

His Sabbatical ties in with the fact of his going to a Literature Festival in his home city of Boston, where he finds his seminar poorly attended because it’s up against one by rising publishing sensation Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which, when he investigates her session, turns out to be what he considers pandering to black stereotypes of living in poverty, crime and misery.… Read the rest

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Animation Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music

SCALA!!!
Or, the incredibly strange rise and fall of the world’s wildest cinema and how it influenced a mixed-up generation of weirdos and misfits

Directors – Ali Catterall, Jane Giles – 2023 – UK – Cert. 18 – 96m

*****

From 1978 to 1993, London’s Scala Cinema programmed everything from art house to sexploitation, ushering in the upcoming generation of anti-establishment musicians, filmmakers, and others – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 5th

Whatever the strengths of this film – and they are legion – it may be impossible for me to write an objective review of it. From my first visit to Tottenham Street to watch an afternoon programme of back-to-back Tex Avery animation shorts on Saturday, 25th October 1980, I could often be found at London’s Scala cinema in the 1980s, broadening my mind as I lapped up welcome servings of movies long or short, old or new, highbrow or trashy. So there are a few additional titbits in what follows which come from my own personal, mental Scala archive of memory rather than from the documentary itself.

As for the date, my memory’s not actually that good. Such information can, however, be discerned from the wondrous if unfeasibly large-sized book SCALA CINEMA 1978-1993, which amongst other things contains all the monthly Scala programmes. It was written by co-director and former Scala employee / programmer Jane Giles’ and edited by fellow co-director Ali Catterall.… Read the rest