"Save Me" -- Going straight to church
New York Times, September 5
"Save Me" establishes a clumsy dialectical agenda straight (so to speak) out of the gate, crosscutting between a day in the life of Mark (Chad Allen), a cocaine-addled young man with a taste for messy sex in cheap motels, and a group of hymn-singing churchgoers with affiliations to the Genesis House, a retreat devoted to converting gay men to heterosexuality. Mark, hitting rock bottom, is shuffled off to Genesis by his brother, and with a quickness made possible less by the power of Jesus than by schematic screenwriting, casts aside his old habits and cheerfully embraces shiny, happy asexuality.

"What We Do Is Secret" recalls Darby Crash
Bay Area Reporter, August 28
If you're a queer fan of the 1970s punk scene, the news you can use from the new film "What We Do Is Secret" is that the legendary gay punk rocker Darby Crash acted like most of us when we first come stumbling out of the closet. First, form a hideous crush on a straight guy, install him in some impossibly vital part of your life where he can do the maximum damage, put the moves on him, then stand back and watch helplessly as chaos descends on your once-comfortable if erotically starved existence.

"Another gay sequel: Gays Gone Wild!"
Variety, August 12
Even a sequel that makes fun of sequels can suffer the dread sophomore slump, as illustrated by "Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild!" This strenuously unfunny follow-up to the uneven but often uproarious "Another Gay Movie" duly maintains the original's levels of raunch and gross-out gags, but it all feels perfunctory, with comic inspiration distinctly lacking.

'Before I Forget' -- Senior moments in a hustler petting-zoo
Bay Area Reporter, July 31
If you're sick of films that sentimentalize old age, Jacques Nolot provides an antidote in "Before I Forget." It's an eccentrically paced, warts-and-all portrait of an aging gigolo with a voracious erotic appetite, burdened by a 60-year-old body that is finally giving in to the ravages of time and a decades-long HIV infection.

"No Regret" -- Sexual identity collides with economic need
New York Times, July 25
The best thing in "No Regret" is the brothel. Down a dingy alleyway in Seoul, South Korea, the "host bar," as it is euphemistically known, is announced by a sign that suggestively promises "X Large." Inside, young men fresh from the provinces cavort with their jaded city colleagues for the delight of an all-male clientele.

"Brideshead Revisited" -- Bright young things in love and pain
New York Times, July 25
"Brideshead Revisited," Julian Jarrold’s strenuously picturesque adaptation of the novel by Evelyn Waugh, conducts a whirlwind tour of the quadrangles of Oxford and the canals of Venice, always returning to the grand country house of the title. At Brideshead, Charles Ryder, a young man with artistic ambition and no special pedigree, falls under the spell of an aristocratic Roman Catholic family, conceiving first a "romantic friendship" with the dissolute, epicene younger son, Sebastian Flyte, and then lusting, in his understated English way, after Sebastian’s sister Julia.

'Chris & Don: A Love Story' -- A May-December love for all seasons
New York Times, June 13
The three-and-a-half-decade relationship of the British writer Christopher Isherwood and the American portrait artist Don Bachardy is one of the ultimate true stories of a proto-gay-marriage succeeding in a forbidding climate. "Chris & Don: A Love Story" examines a complicated and enduring relationship that raised eyebrows even in Hollywood.

"A Jihad for Love" -- Torn by the contradictions of being gay and Muslim
New York Times, May 23
Sad to say, "A Jihad for Love" is not a sequel to the pornographic satire "The Raspberry Reich" (2004), in which pseudo-revolutionaries exhort their comely comrades to "join the homosexual intifada!" It is, rather more arduously, a dispatch from the outer limits of marginalization: a documentary on devout Muslims struggling with their homosexuality.

"XXY" -- Confronting the perils of puberty squared
New York Times, April 2
How must the world appear to someone who has been treated as an exotic clinical specimen from birth? The moody, surreal "XXY" explores the world of Alex (Inés Efron), an intersex teenager — born with both male and female sex organs — navigating the treacherous emotional and hormonal rapids of uncertain gender. The movie, directed by the Argentine filmmaker Lucía Puenzo and based on Sergio Bizzio’s short story "Cinismo," is not a clinical case study, though months of research went into its creation. It is a somber, brooding study of Alex and her parents as they face the painful crossroads when adulthood looms.

"Shelter's" gay affair
Bay Area Reporter, March 27
In writer/director Jonah Markowitz's sizzling debut feature "Shelter," Zach (Trevor Wright) has put his artistic future on hold to play substitute dad for his single sister's five-year-old son. Juggling babysitting, short-order-cook duties and a bed-dead girlfriend has Zach at wit's end until an encounter with his best friend's older brother Shaun (Brad Rowe) rips his world apart. (Click here to view trailer.)

"The Walker" -- Crimes of the naive, superficial heart
New York Times, December 14, 2007
Nothing in Paul Schrader’s film "The Walker" can quite match its delicious opening scene of sniping repartee over canasta among three Washington grandes dames and their pet gay playmate. Lynn (Kristin Scott Thomas), Natalie (Lauren Bacall) and Abigail (Lily Tomlin) constitute what may be the screen’s most formidable threesome of jaded, dirt-dishing socialites since "The Women." As the fourth card player, Carter Page III, the scion of a Virginia political dynasty that reached a pinnacle of respectability during the Watergate hearings, Woody Harrelson plays a gay, bewigged, forked-tongue charmer drooling gossip inside this viper’s nest. (Click here to view trailer.)

"Dirty Laundry" -- A black gay man with family
New York Times, December 7, 2007
"Dirty Laundry," the second feature by the writer and director Maurice Jamal, is a back-to-your-roots film about a gay African-American named Sheldon who meets a young son he didn’t know he had, and revisits his extended family in an intolerant Southern town he once fled in the name of self-respect. (Click here to view trailer.)

"Fat Girls" -- Broad comedy
New York Times, November 3, 2007
A plaintive portrait of a gay high school student looking for love in a small Texas town? Or a warmed-over John Waters-style farce that ridicules easy targets like evangelical Christians and petty high school bureaucrats? "Fat Girls" doesn’t know which it wants to be and ends up stranded between two concepts, either of which might have yielded a more satisfying film. (Click here to view trailer.)

"Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe"
New York Times, October 19, 2007
James Crump’s documentary, "Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe," is a potent exercise in art-world mythography that might be nicknamed "The Prince and the Punk." The prince was Wagstaff, a suave, dashingly handsome museum curator and pioneering collector of photographs from an aristocratic New York background of which he was exceedingly proud. His protégé and lover, Mapplethorpe, who became a famous (and infamous) photographer, was the punk who grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Queens and, under Wagstaff’s tutelage, ascended to the upper reaches of art-world society.

Movie Review: "Naked Boys Singing!" -- Swinging singers
New York Times, October 12, 2007
In "Naked Boys Singing!" 10 grown men (including one natural redhead) go full monty while belting out show tunes and high-kicking like muscular Rockettes. The show’s injury log must make for very colorful reading. Save for an occasional arty flourish, the film simply restages the popular revue that since its 1998 Los Angeles premiere has taken bouncing genitalia to raunch-deprived audiences worldwide.

"The Bible Tells Me So" -- Bible lesson in gay rights
New York Times, October 5, 2007
Daniel Karslake’s documentary "For the Bible Tells Me So" is mainly intended as a feature-length primer that can be deployed in arguments with homophobes. The movie’s ensemble portrait of parents (many who are ministers) with adult gay or lesbian children strives to demonstrate that homosexuality is a genetic predisposition, not a lifestyle choice. They also say that those who quote Leviticus to justify their animosity are guilty not just of intolerance but also of selective piety, an inability to understand historical context and poor reading comprehension.

"Freshman Orientation": The malleable nature of sexuality
New York Times, September 28, 2007
A campus comedy with a dirty mouth, an innocent heart and a surprisingly wise mind, "Freshman Orientation" uses identity politics as a road to romance and emotional maturity. Originally named "Home of Phobia" for its 2004 Sundance premiere, the movie follows Clay a hormonal Midwestern freshman who feigns gayness to breach the defenses of a sorority doll named Amanda. But as Clay becomes increasingly immersed in his manufactured identity, he begins to realize that charades may just be the most popular game on campus.

"The Man of My Life" -- Old-style male bonding turns toward the tender
New York Times, September 21, 2007
In "The Man of My Life," the French director Zabou Breitman and her screenwriting partner Agnès de Sacy examine male bonding from a feminine perspective. As it ponders father-son relationships and the quasi-erotic attraction between two middle-aged men, one straight, the other gay, this soft-hearted movie portrays both men and women as coming from Venus; forget about Mars. The men talk about relationships, not sports, and when they go jogging, they don’t compete. When one man twists his ankle, the other tenderly carries him home on his back.

"Cruising" released on DVD
New York Times, September 18, 2007
Controversial when it opened in 1980, William Friedkin’s "Cruising," a thriller about the search for a serial killer in that era’s flourishing world of New York gay leather bars, generated only a murmur when it returned to theaters this month as a prelude to its DVD release. The Village Voice, which led the protest against Mr. Friedkin’s film even as it was being shot in the West Village, greeted the rerelease with condescension colored by a certain nostalgia. "Nothing at the orgy is as shocking as the smile on everyone’s face," the critic Nathan Lee wrote, lamenting the post-AIDS decline of Mr. Friedkin’s vividly depicted Sin City.