A Royal Night Out (2015)

We've seen royal daughters or the daughters of American Presidents going incognito to experience 'normal life', from Roman Holiday to Disney's Aladdin, and the twist here is that this movie tells of an actual example from history in which Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret embarked one night out of the palace to celebrate the end of the war, which may well have happened but almost certainly not as it is presented in this easy-enough-to-watch but heavily, heavily fictionalised comedy romance. 

★★★☆☆

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Bros (2022)

The point is made that members of the LGBTQIA+ community need to be seen - in schools, in gallery exhibits, in movies - and that their lives are not heteronormative...and then a story as mawkish as a traditional Hallmark romance plays out with one of the two main characters even needing love to help him open the chocolate shop of his childhood dreams - perhaps I missed the irony - and that the film stays close to our central couple who have very little chemistry, and that there are no peripheral characters whose names, stories or faces you'll remember make Bros pretty irritating and boring, and anyway, Hallmark released its first gay romance in December 2022, so check out that schmaltz instead, maybe, if romance is your thing.

★★★☆☆

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The String (Le Fil) (2009)

Won't it be nice one day to not have to watch and rewatch this story over and over again about homosexual lovers keeping their love a secret, sometimes in the Pyrenees, sometimes in Wyoming, but here, in Tunisia, where class — not just homosexuality — plays a role in rich and privileged architect Malik wanting to keep his love of poor shoeless home-help Bilal a secret from mommy — a minor, well-meaning story set in an interesting cultural context but an oh-so-familiar one with lurching tonal shifts, sometimes opting for screwball sex comedy, sometimes becoming an absurdist farce with its peculiar "string" analogy thrown in only occasionally, and in its worst moments, it is a condescending social commentary. 

★★☆☆☆

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Esteros (2016)

 

Esteros

It includes occasional glimpses of the beautiful Iberá wetlands and ends sweetly, but wading through the  flashbacks showing Matias and Jeronimo's burgeoning childhood romance and waiting for the adult Matias to reconcile long-lost feelings after he reunites with Jeronimo at the summerhouse where they first discovered their love for each other is pretty ponderous. 

★★☆☆☆ 

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Call Me By Your Name (2017)

This movie is not quite the intoxicating mix of art, music, philosophy and poetry that it wants to be and exactly what is appealing about older American Oliver, who has the whole town of Lombardy, Italy in a swoon, is mystifying, but thanks to Timothée Chalamet's wonderful performance as young Elio, the often dull, chemistry-free, and troubling romance culminates in a moving finale.

★★★☆☆

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God's Own Country (2017)

It is easy to see what attracts Johnny Saxby, a farmer's son working his father's struggling farm in The Pennines, to Gheorghe, a handsome Romanian immigrant farmhand who has arrived to help, but not so much the other way round given Johnny's boozing, drinking milk from the carton, and general all-over disaffectedness, so when first lust erupts then romance blossoms between the two, it is quite hard to believe, as is the pair's readiness to strip each other down in the freezing pre-dawn country air that otherwise dictates their need for gloves and coats while they are birthing lambs and building boundary fences together after sun up, but if you are prepared to wait out their chemistry- and drama-free couplings, there is a nice pay-off at the movie's very end when Johnny Saxby finally softens, music finally plays, and warmth finally arrives.

★★☆☆☆

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Happy Together (春光乍洩) (Chung gwong cha sit) (1997)

A passionate but dysfunctional relationship plays out in Argentina in Wong Kar-wai's utterly captivating 1997 love story that, with Tony Leung in the lead, with the prominence of a hypnotic soundtrack, with its foreign setting like a timeless other world, and with its whispered secrets (here, whispered into a cassette player, not a hole in a wall at Angkor Wat), feels as much a part of the director's other romantic works, Days of Being Wild, In The Mood For Love, and 2046, which are considered a loose trilogy but for some reason not a tetralogy.

★★★★★

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Moonlight (2017)

This heart-rending drama traces the formative years of Chiron, a boy in so much pain you yearn for life to show him a little kindness as it moulds him into a man not strictly of his own choosing.

★★★★☆

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Brokeback Mountain (2005)

This Ang Lee movie is about two cowboys, Jake Gyllenhaal and a mumbling Heath Ledger, whose relaxed nudie, towel-whipping funtimes together at a favourite remote mountain spot are starkly contrasted with their separate and mostly unhappy lives back in society where respectively Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway keep their homes and families.

★★★★☆

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