How to Survive a Plague

We're now far enough from that era that seeing it all again feels like a slap to the face in the same way that watching certain moments in the civil rights epic "Eyes on the Prize" chills your bones. This doesn't have that series' stately magnitude. It's smaller and crasser, but it's comparatively galvanic.

ACT UP soldiers on today, as it must, given the lack of official attention to the resurgence of HIV among young American men in metropolitan areas.

Millions of lives have been saved - and extended - as the result of a tireless cadre of advocates who, as Eigo states, "put their bodies on the line."

How to Survive a Plague, while a shaggier-structured documentary than many, is a heart-wrenching portrait of one of the saddest, most heroic chapters in American history.

As activist Larry Kramer remarked, the movement had "its good cops and its bad cops", and there is a remarkable, angry, passionate funeral speech from campaigner Bob Rafsky that helped mobilise Act Up and awaken America's conscience.

This blistering, Oscar-nominated documentary tells how its members refused to let patients become pariahs.

Scrappy and unsubtle where "We Were Here" is elegant and nuanced, How to Survive a Plague isn't nearly as formally beautiful as its predecessor.

Watching this film is an undeniably bitter-sweet experience and you cannot help but feel the highs and, more so, the lows with the victims. It's masterful use of archive footage ensures that the audience is dragged back to that time to witness the achievements of human will and the damage caused by prejudice, tradition and inaction. A truly moving and important piece of cinema.

A truly powerful film about a group of individuals who, through force of will and against the threat of imminent death, moved big Pharma, federal, state, and local governments and society at large into action to develop drugs which would save many of their lives. I would have given the film a higher score had it been a bit more even-handed politically. I don't blame the individuals in the film for lashing out at Reagan & Bush the elder. They were in power - the buck stopped with them. Other than a brief sequence, the film gives Clinton a pass. And the film completely ignores what George W. Bush did for AIDS treatment in Africa - that is, more than any other world leader had ever done. Had it at least made this acknowledgement, it would have been a near-perfect doc. (All the shots of George HW Bush golfing? Far too partisan without the shots of Clinton at all the Arkansas basketball games, etc.)

In my estimation you must show two sides of a subject to consider yourself a documentary. We see maybe two or three shots of various politicians saying slightly inflammatory things and this is the only opposing perspective we receive. Then in the the final half hour of the film we see our heroes admitting that most everything they did during the first hour and a half was misguided, but they redeem themselves with their actions at the end. There is no evidence in this film that the group Act Up had anything to do with the progress that has been made in Aids research. Their is also no evidence in this film that the politicians that they demonize stalled Aids research in any way. I'm sure that this film is getting the positive publicity that it is because it revolves around the scariest most deadly disease of the last 30-40 years. However if you are going to pass your film off as a documentary as pure fact and not an editorial then you need to give me some facts to hold on to. This is no documentary.