Week One Shorts

Following are reviews of movies premièring in the first week of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, July 10-16. Up to the day of the show, tickets may be purchased in person at TLA Video locations (11 a.m.-10 p.m.), by phone at 267-765-9700, ext. 4, and online at phillyfests.org (up to 24 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the screening venue. Tickets are $10. All times are p.m. Coverage continues next week.

= Recommended

Venue Codes: AB = Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad St. | BBP = Black Box at the Prince, 1412 Chestnut St. | PMT = Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St. | WT = Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St.

Affinity | Antarctica | The Art of Being Straight | Bangkok Love Story | Between Something & Nothing | Boystown | Burn the Bridges | Call Me Troy | Clandestinos | Eleven Minutes | Four Windows | Grimm Love | Midnight Cowboy | Mulligans | The New World | Out Late | The Quest for the Missing Piece | Ready? OK! | SoleJourney | Tru Loved | When Kiran Met Karen | Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon

Equal parts Masterpiece Theatre, Medium and Caged Heat, Tim Fywell's adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel starts strong but loses it as the plot unfolds. Set in Victorian England, the film follows Margaret, a visitor at a women's prison, as she meets (and falls for) the imprisoned Selina, who claims to be a spirit medium. As their relationship deepens, Margaret has to decide if Selina is telling the truth about her power or if Margaret is simply losing her mind. It's not your clichéd lesbian-prison camp, but Affinity overreaches, and creative cinematography just comes off as sloppy. Still, the production design — in all its repressive Victorian glory — makes up for some shortcomings. —Molly Eichel (July 11, 7:15 WT; July 12, 2:15 WT)

Yair Hochner's tiresome and uneven dramedy follows the lives of several young Israelis looking for love and sex, and the distinction between them. A few days shy of turning 30, Omer (Tomer Ilan) has no trouble bringing men home, but he can't even remember their faces, let alone their names. Three years after a two-night stand with a young dancer, he's still fixated, unable to move forward but unhappy with where he is. There's a muddled sincerity lurking under the movie's surfaces (Hochner wrote the script not long after coming out and moving in with his lover), but it's clouded by forcibly awkward touches: Omer's mother is played, for no apparent reason, by a fat man in drag, and the movie's voice of romantic wisdom is a dotty novelist who believes that aliens visit Earth on a regular basis. Avoid. —Sam Adams (July 12, 9:30 WT; July 14, 5:00 PMT)

The Art of Being Straight

Jesse Rosen's debut feature plays with the concept of blurred sexuality. The film begins with its two main characters, one gay and one straight, deciding that they can no longer define themselves within a single sexual identity. What makes it worth watching is the ease with which these two post-college twentysomethings go about exploring their new options. Jon (Jesse Rosen) and Maddy (Rachel Castillo) realize that who they thought they were is just as unclear as who they want to be, and that maybe we're all a little queer. —Caitlin Roller (July 14, 7:15 WT; July 18, 5:00 AB)

Stylish as all hell, Poj Arnon's tale of two strapping Thai dudes and their forbidden love will draw inevitable Brokeback comparisons, but it unfolds more like a queer Southeast Asian homage to Michael Mann than a slow-burn Ang Lee epic. Gun-for-hire Cloud (Rattanaballang Tohssawat) is tasked with killing hetero police informant Iht (Chaiwat Thongsaeng), but when the transaction turns sour and Cloud gets shot, the pair hides out on a dingy rooftop, where longful glances and suggestive sponge baths turn into hot, heavy, humid sex fests faster than you can say pad see ew. The film looks gorgeous, but the multitude of pining, crying montages backed by pop ballads are a little hard to take, especially considering most of them take place in really dramatic rainstorms. —Drew Lazor (July 13, 7:00 PMT; July 16, 5:00 WT)

Between Something & Nothing

The elements of Todd Verow's work that once could be dismissed as technical deficiencies now, with a steady output averaging a film a year since his 1995 feature debut, Frisk, have to be taken as stylistic quirks. His latest is an indirect follow-up to 2006's autobiographical Vacationland, depicting his years as an art student and part-time hustler at the Rhode Island School of Design. Both films share a surfeit of affectless acting and tangential storylines, but the friendship between the director's alter ego and a female student with a penchant for shoplifting provides a spine for the often wandering narrative to cling to. —Shaun Brady (July 16, 9:30 WT; July 20, 12:15 AB)

Boystown

A sort of queer Jerry Lewis sensibility drives Spaniard Juan Flahn's grinning screwball comedy, which skewers the commodification of gay culture with metronomic mirth. Slobbish lovers Ray (Carlos Fuentes) and Leo (Pepon Nieto), who reside, unassumingly, in the gay-gentrifying neighborhood of Cheucatown, are too busy bickering to notice that alpha-male developer Victor (Pablo Puyol) is murdering old ladies and snatching the deeds to their valuable flats. Over-the-hill police inspector Mila (Rosa Maria Sardá) gets a scent on the case, but is stricken by various irrational phobias — except the most obvious one when stomping around a borough full of gay dudes. Plenty of laughs thanks to the beat-perfect comedic timing of both script and cast. —D.L. (July 12, 5:00 PMT; July 13, 9:15 PMT)

The despair is plenty palpable in Burn the Bridges — but that's not necessarily a good thing. In a decaying estate, the matriarch is dying. She is being cared for by her daughter, who is interested in sleeping with her brother, who, unbeknownst to sis, is pining for the mysterious new guy at Catholic school. While this good-looking Mexican film percolates with sexual tension, co-writer/director Francisco Franco jettisons the interesting hothouse drama and gay sexuality to focus on minor, less interesting characters and subplots, like a ping-pong-playing boarder or a lovesick nun. Alas, Burn the Bridges burns more than tingles. —Gary M. Kramer (July 14, 7:15 PMT; July 18, 5:00 PMT)

Call Me Troy

Scott Bloom's portrait of Metropolitan Community Church founder Troy Perry is appropriately inspirational, following Perry from his early days as a closeted minister to MCC's present-day status as the largest organization serving Christian gays and lesbians. Born in Tallahassee, Perry speaks with a raucous, emphatic Southern cadence, and speaks of the glory of God and the joys of leather bars with equal enthusiasm. Despite its darker moments — Perry's suicide attempt, the destruction by arson of MCC's first Los Angeles church — the movie is resolutely upbeat, due mainly to the volcanic force of Perry's charisma. —S.A. (July 13, 5:00 PMT)

Clandestinos

Made 20 years after a Mexican film of the same name about a romance between two Cuban freedom fighters, Antonio Hens' film has similar socio-political undertones. Xabi (Israel Rodríguez), a lithe Basque separatist, busts out of a youth detention center with Mexican friend Joel, and Driss, a Moroccan who stumbles into their escape plot. Xabi immediately sets out to reconnect with Iñaki (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), an older ETA member who gave him the affection the orphan craved and a sense of importance. But when an explosion in Madrid designed to impress Iñaki derails a bigger operation, Xabi learns that love and revolution can be strange, and incompatible, bedfellows. While the end wraps everything up a little too neatly, and Hens' puppy love-meets-political terrorism plot teeters on far-fetched, the film's a fairly deft pairing of eye candy and substance. —Brian Howard (July 15, 5:00 PMT; July 20, 7:00 PMT)

Eleven Minutes

Michael Selditch and Rob Tate's documentary chronicles Project Runway alum Jay McCarroll's frantic scramble to produce Transit, a collection of transportation-inspired clothing for New York's spring 2007 Fashion Week. Despite working with almost no money and in the unpleasant company of a flock of PR and industry bitches, McCarroll maintains his cool and sense of humor. Even when breaking down, he's charmingly self-conscious and aware of how little a patterned trench coat matters at the end of the day. He compares 11 minutes — the short time his runway show will actually take — to "a long shit" and confesses that all he wants to do in life is run a bed-and-breakfast with his boyfriend and dog. Ultimately, the film is a sweet look at the larger-than-life McCarroll, a terrifying intro to the fashion industry and 100 minutes of beautiful clothes. —Monica Weymouth (July 13, 9:30 WT)

First-time director Christian Moris Müller's obstinately vague psychodrama is neatly cleaved into four vignettes, each loosely centered on one member of a direly dysfunctional German family. Frequent Michael Haneke cinematographer Jürgen Jürges' portentous long shots imbue the proceedings with a weighty foreboding, but Müller refuses any payoff, an absence that feels less like ambiguity than pretense. The clan's deviances are lazy grabs at demure shock value, from the son's cruising for gay sex to father and daughter making mysterious eyes at each other. The narrative ellipses merely attempt to hide the fact that Four Windows' insights are no more profound than American Beauty-style suburbanite self-loathing. —S.B. (July 12, 12:00 WT; July 14, 9:30 WT)

Martin Weisz's turgid fictionalization of the Armin Meiwes cannibal case — where the now-imprisoned German located a man on the Internet to be voluntarily eaten — is too fixated on bells and whistles to live up to the "psychological thriller" label on its packaging. Approaching the infamous true-crime story from the perspective of Katie Armstrong (Keri Russell), an American grad student writing her thesis on the case, is an honest attempt to level with the audience, but it seems like one hoop too many after realizing that Weisz (The Hills Have Eyes 2) would rather beta-test neato film-editing techniques than at least attempt to build a case for why it went down to begin with. Thomas Kretschmann and Thomas Huber (eater and eatee, respectively) turn in aboveboard performances despite this. —D.L. (July 12, 12:30 PMT; July 21, 9:15 PMT)

Midnight Cowboy

Although it hasn't dated enormously well, John Schlesinger's 1969 tale of a country rube (Jon Voight) who becomes a big-city hustler is hard to resist when Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo is on screen. Spitting rapid-fire patter in a nasal drawl, he's an adorable thug, full of little-man's rage and urban bluster. The price of the movie's venture into then-unexplored territory is a layer of anthropological remove: It held its subjects at arm's length so that middle-class moviegoers (and Oscar voters) could get close without getting mud on their shoes. Despite, or because of, its queasy maneuvering, the movie allows flashes of unfiltered truth to poke through, enough to solace the natives without frightening the tourists. The festival's special screening of a new 35 mm print includes Voight's screen test and appearances by cast members Brenda Vaccaro, Bob Balaban and Sylvia Miles. —S.A. (July 12, 7:15 PMT)

In golf, a mulligan is a second chance granted to a player who screws up a shot. In Chip Hale's debut feature, it's a closeted young hottie named Chase (Charlie David), who is granted, in a way, to his college pal's dad — also closeted, also a hottie. No sooner does Chase visit the family's beautiful summer home than he and dad are canoodling, appropriately, on the golf course. The rest goes down gay-Graduate-style, only David, who wrote the script, is no Dustin Hoffman, and bland, corny dialogue make a potentially engaging story — a middle-aged man coming out to his family — unfold like an After School Special. David has a strong onscreen presence, but the rest of the cast, in particular Derek Baynham as the in-your-face hetero son, prove embarrassingly subpar. —Tami Fertig (July 11, 9:45 PMT; July 13, 12:00 PMT)

The New World

Lucie (Natalia Dontcheva) and Marion (Vanessa Larré) are hip young lesbians living together in France. Marion is content with their rowdy, bar-hopping existence, but Lucie dreams of pregnant bellies and doe-eyed babes. After some soul-searching, the two embark on a father-finding journey, Marion reticently hand-holding. Director Étienne Dhaene's first film is sweet and not overly ambitious, affecting without taking itself too seriously. Nothing is too dire, all is never lost, but when the women find themselves with everything they ever wanted, it suddenly seems like too much. —Cecilia Razak (July 16, 7:15 AB; July 19, 12:15 WT)

Out Late

Elaine, the spunky first subject of Out Late, came out of the closet when she was 79. Now, she's looking for love — and sex, like the sex she's been fantasizing about for more than 50 years, like the sex she sees on The L Word — but single lesbians her age are hard to find. She wonders if there even are any. This is what's most heartbreaking about Beatrice Alda and Jennifer Brooke's documentary: that the brave seniors who shake the fear of rejection and come out to their family and friends after a lifetime of misery, or shame, or denial, struggle to find those intimate partnerships they've desired for so long. Out Late showcases five such stories that send a clear message: The longer you wait to come out, the longer it takes for your life to begin. —Carolyn Huckabay (July 12, 12:30 BBP)

The Quest for the Missing Piece

Like the good Jewish son that he is, Israeli documentarian Oded Lotan's quest begins and ends with his mother. But he doesn't stop there. In his attempt to reconcile his feelings on circumcision, Lotan turns his camera on his boyfriend, his sister, friends with sons, a psychologist, a 7-year-old German Muslim preparing for the rite, a Russian émigré undergoing the procedure as an adult, various mohels and the Community of Parents to Intact Children. The 52-minute film is neither self-indulgence nor propaganda, but one man coming to terms with being a member of a tribe that struggles to accept him. —M.J.Fine (July 13, 2:30 BBP)

Ready? OK!

Andrea (Carrie Preston) is having some trouble getting inside her son's head. Joshua (Lurie Poston) is a jolly, gold-haired 10-year-old whose behavior doesn't quite fit in at his Catholic school, whether he's practicing cheers, braiding a girl's hair or pinning the picture of the wrestling team captain onto his shirt. Writer-director James Vasquez's directorial debut tenderly establishes Josh's whimsical naivete as a way to unify his family in distress — Andrea's father died and her directionless brother is living in a car outside her house. Slapstick-y moments sometimes dance around the issue of intolerance, but the movie balances steadily between light comedy and domestic drama, presenting conflicts realistically while not jeopardizing the friendly, spirited tone. —Mark Maurer (July 11, 7:15 AB; July 13, 4:30 PMT)

"I'm going to choose to acknowledge my anger," declares actor Chad Allen, "and I'm going to choose to return with love." In Kate Burns and Sheila Schroeder's earnest, sometimes repetitive documentary, Allen speaks for Soulforce, which uses nonviolent resistance to, as executive director Jeff Lutes puts it, "confront what we see as the primary source of homophobia in this country, which is religion-based prejudice." The group finds a particular target in James Dobson and Focus on the Family, engaged in a noisy campaign against gay marriage and families. Soulforce members cite Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights legislation to make their case. "Reconciliation," says co-founder Mel White, "doesn't mean necessarily that we learn to accept each other's doctrines that lead to harm." —Cindy Fuchs (July 12, 2:45 BBP)

Juno minus pregnancy plus Bruce Vilanch multiplied by LGBTQ is the rough equation that wrought Tru Loved, Stewart Wade's starry-eyed-to-a-fault dramedy. Strong-minded Tru (Najarra Townsend) finds herself on the fringes when her two moms move her from progressive San Fran to a conservative little town in the Valley; here, she befriends closeted star QB Lodell (Matthew Thompson) and fills the role of his fake girlfriend, founds a gay-straight alliance to combat prejudice, falls for dreamboat Trevor (Jake Abel; Vilanch plays his gay writer uncle), etc. Townsend has an effortless charm about her, but Wade's script waits far too long to bite into the real issues — homophobia and intolerance in youth. It all wraps up too neatly to properly convey any concrete remedies to the problems. —D.L. (July 12, 7 WT; July 13, 2:30 WT)

Kiran (Chriselle Almeida) is a rising Bollywood star; Karen (Kelli Holsopple) is the journalist whose interview inevitably turns into a tryst that threatens the actress's career. While the film touches on the cultural prejudices of the Indian film industry (hell, kissing Richard Gere can get you blacklisted), director/co-writer Manan Singh Katohora's single-night approach doesn't give the repercussions time to resonate. While it does last, the action is captured with the pace and flair of a security camera, laboriously detailing each step as characters tromp from room to room, culminating in a twist so contrived it takes two of the characters to explain it to the third. —S.B. (July 12, 9:30 PMT; July 13, 12:15 BBP)

Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon

For most of the 1970s, Jack Wrangler was the biggest name in gay porn, and that's not even the extraordinary part. The son of a Hollywood producer whose credits included Champion and Home of the Brave, Jack Stillman approached his adult-film career like any other entertainer. He did his own publicity, put out his own line of sex toys, and even wrote his own theme songs. After conquering the burgeoning post-Stonewall gay industry, he set his sights on straight porn, and rose to the top there, as well. After that, the story gets genuinely strange: Wrangler drops out of porn, marries a well-known female singer decades older than him and reinvents himself as a man of theater. As Michael Musto puts it, "You couldn't make this shit up." Jeffrey Schwarz's documentary doesn't reinvent the wheel, but he draws on a intriguing cast of commentators including Samuel Delany, Marc Shaiman and Bruce Vilanch, and ably condenses the fascinating sprawl of Wrangler's life into a neat, bulging package. —S.A. (July 12, 9:45 BBP; July 13, 5:00, WT)