New LGBT Films Worth A Look?

Beach Rats

Via Queerty. The reviews from Sundance are not so good.

One of the most-talked films from Sundance Film Festival finally has its first trailer.

Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats stars model-turned-actor Harris Dickinson, who reportedly gives an emotionally — and quite often physically — naked performance.

The Daily Beast has seen the film and hails it as “the rare gay drama, and maybe the next wave of queer storytelling, that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

Hittman’s followup to It Felt Like Love is set in Coney Island and centers around Frankie, a teenager who compulsively cruises gay hookup sites.

This is not-so-subtly foreshadowed in the film’s first trailer, which finds the character languidly going through poses in the mirror, trying to snap that ever-elusive perfect selfie.

Watch trailer: 

Sundance review:

 

Akron

Via Out. Perhaps this one is worth a viewing?

Benny and Christopher, students at Ohio’s University of Akron in the new movie Akron, are not just homeboys who grew up in the same state; they’re homo boys. As embodied by Matthew Frias and Edmund Donovan they’re both openly-gay, well-adjusted-gay, handsome-gay; complimenting each other in the brown-eyed/blue-eyed, Latino/Wasp way of couples that you see in TV commercials aimed at the gay market.

These guys are so perfectly, beautifully queer it is obvious that the directors Sasha King and Brian O’Donnell are making a social statement: The millennial “Love Wins” movement doesn’t just belong to coastal big cities. Akron shows it to be a hallmark of middle America (like Joseph Graham’s Philadelphia-set Something Beautiful, the best American queer movie of 2016). Through Benny and Christopher, families of different ethnicities and social backgrounds are united in the acceptance of their gay children.

Watch the trailer:

The entire film is also available on YouTube with a subscription.