Very few films accept the contradicting velocities of gay desire the way Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo does.
The filmmakers and performers show great maturity in refusing to settle scores or spill secrets.
Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary raises important questions about the limits of pedagogy.
At first, the film’s dark humor is amusing, only for it to wear off once an actual plot kicks into motion.
What the film embodies, unfortunately, is the listlessness of its slacker characters.
The film’s fatal mistake is to make up for blindness, instead of embracing it as something other than a liability.
Writer-director Tim Kirkman tries to peg depth of character on the character of Dean instead of having him earn it.
It’s difficult to find a reason for the film’s existence beyond a spoiled platform for James Franco’s ersatz boldness.
Glenn Close’s face teems with a flawlessly controlled gravitas that’s completely at odds with the film’s ordinariness.
André Téchiné does justice to the closeness between repulsion and desire, difference and sameness.
From the overtly vibrant colors to the caricaturesque dimensions of the performances, it promises a great allegorical message that never arrives.
In the logic of the film, for the camera to move at all would feel like a betrayal of its contemplative hunger.
It’s when Stephen Dunn dares to inhabit the how and not the what of queerness that the film feels authentic and deliciously strange.
Paul Verhoeven’s film isn’t afraid to inhabit the maddening ambivalence of pleasure.
It’s an entertaining and unapologetic tale of female risk-taking, filled with clever camerawork, but the characters remain shallow.
Clea DuVall crafts an entire film out of aborted attempts at a revelation that feel completely anodyne.
The film’s structure, however stifling, is filled with gorgeous imagery and nuanced symbolism.
It unapologetically warns us at every turn that fashion is nothing but a business, fueled by naïveté and rape.
The very few instances where stereotypes are challenged are forced and didactically delivered.
Essentially a post-apocalyptic telenovela, it sanitizes the concept of sisterhood, and even womanhood.