BFI Flare: Thinking clearly

The 34th edition of BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival continues to run virtually, via the BFI Player, so I've been watching movies at home in isolation. There's only a very small selection of features from the festival available to review, so I hope the filmmakers have found other ways to get their work out there - I'm happy to give it a boost if I can! There are a lot of shorts online for press to cover, so I'll include a roundup of those in my final post on the festival, plus reviews on the website of everything. My usual Critical Week roundup of non-festival films is below (everything there is currently streaming!). But first, here are three more Flare highlights...

The Lawyer [Advokatas]
dir-scr-prd Romas Zabarauskas; with Eimutis Kvosciauskas, Dogac Yildiz 20/Lit ****
Set in Vilnius, Lithuania, this soft-spoken topical romance explores the nature of attraction with a collection of realistic characters and situations. Filmmaker Romas Zabarauskas never pushes things over the top, maintaining a tight sense of realism while digging into some provocative themes with honest complexity. At its heart, this is a properly touching love story, and as the story develops it works its way deeply under the skin.... FULL REVIEW >

Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story
dir Posy Dixon; with Glenn Copeland, Jeremy Costello 19/UK ****
There's a loose approach to this documentary, which approaches issues of race and gender from the striking perspective of a black trans man who survived the tumultuous cultural climate of the 50s and 60s and, after gaining experience as a musician, recorded his now-iconic eponymous album in 1986. With a fluid style, director Posy Dixon lets the story unfold in a way that's powerfully moving... FULL REVIEW >

Ask Any Buddy
dir-prd Evan Purchell; with Casey Donovan, Al Parker, Jack Wrangler, Peter Berlin 19/US ****
A feature based on the eponymous Instagram feed, this cinematic collage uses clips from 125 theatrical movies from 1968-1986, creating a fascinating depiction of gay life between Stonewall and the Aids epidemic. This isn't about realism, it's about how filmmakers depicted the lifestyle on-screen. Editing together pornographic films that were shot in real-life locations, filmmaker Evan Purchell creates an unusual documentary portrait of the subculture as it expressed its sexual freedom... FULL REVIEW >

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C R I T I C A L   W E E K

In the absence of press screenings, I've had a lots of films to watch while home-isolating this week. On the flight from Los Angeles to London, I watched The Wolf Hour, the dark and rather gloomy dramatic thriller starring Naomi Watts. Also this week, there was the Catherine Deneuve/Juliette Binoche drama The Truth, an expertly understated drama by maestro Hirokazu Kore-eda; the oddly muted remake Human Capital, starring Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei; the mindless guilty pleasure action of Bloodshot, with Vin Diesel as an indestructible operative; the surprisingly astute political satire The Hunt, which squares off Betty Gilpin against Hilary Swank; and the thin but enjoyable romcom Hooking Up with Brittany Snow and Sam Richardson.

In addition to the BFI Flare movies, arthouse gems included the German social services drama System Crasher and Saudi Arabia's astonishing The Perfect Candidate - both are entertaining, surprising and unmissable. And also on the flight, I watched the Bollywood action comedy The Man Who Feels No Pain starring the painfully likeable Abhimanyu Dasani (pictured). The title kind of explains it all, but it's solid corny entertainment.

BFI Flare continues through this weekend, and this coming week I'm hoping things aren't quite so busy. Films I need to watch include Billy Crystal in Standing Up Falling Down, Ben Affleck in The Way Back, Disney's remake of The Lady and the Tramp, the entertainment industry drama Tape, the thriller From Iceland to Eden, the black comedy Dogs Don't Wear Pants and the football doc The Australian Dream.