Richard Lawson

Jim Queen is a crass, profane, giddily stupid romp through a heap of stereotypes about gay life in Paris. It’s teeming with jokes about prostate orgasms, about tops and bottoms, about fetishes and bodily fluids and G’d out party bois. It comes as a welcome shock to the system here at this august, black-tie film festival. I just wish the movie was funnier and fresher than it is.

Los Javis execute this mighty vision with thrilling technical bravado. Nearly every shot in the film is a carefully composed wonder, either an eye-popping still-life tableau or a breathtaking bit of camera movement, all done up in lush, expensive-looking period detail. It’s a dazzlingly assured film, delivering the heady satisfaction of seeing something ambitious actually land its nervy attempt

It’s a handsomely mounted film, full of precise period detail, but is otherwise undistinguished from many solemn, exacting biopics that have come before it.

Club Kid isn’t really a whitewashed vanity project. It’s a confident, exciting directorial debut, stylish in an unobtrusive way and agreeably paced.

It’s heady, strange stuff, perhaps not as emotionally resonant as TV Glow, but captivating in both its confusion and honesty.

The steadily accumulated emotional weight of the film dissipates rather quickly as it reaches its abrupt ending. Still, Blue Heron is an affecting, promising debut feature.

The film is somehow both glancing and melodramatic, a strange and underwhelming cocktail of blasé Euro sleekness and TV-movie drama. Ah well. At least the clothes are nice.

The Drama is a handsomely made, sharply performed letdown. It is yet another example of a far too common occurrence: a kicky logline premise having no real structure behind it.

Perhaps if the film was more polished, and had some added depth, it might feel more substantial. As is, Hanging by a Wire is a gripping story not told thoroughly enough.

Though The Musical may lack a feeling of modernity, it could make up for that elsewhere: with tart humor, with unexpected plot developments, with compelling performances. But, alas, Bonilla and her actors can’t do much to leaven the leaden script they’ve been handed.