Sure there was Fire Island (cliché’) and BROS “overly cliché’ both released in America but thee were some really great gay movies in 2022. Just not from any major studio and in most cases not from the United States but they are out there.
Take a look below for our pics of Best Gay Movies 2022:
Keep the Cameras Rolling: The Pedro Zamora Way” charts how the charismatic and articulate HIV-positive Cuban-American Zamora with movie star looks, wound up a star on MTV’s 1992 “The Real World (the first reality TV show). He educated viewers about living with HIV, then as one of TV’s few openly gay people, married his boyfriend in the first televised gay wedding, decades before it became legal. Roommate Judd Winick and housemate Pam Ling later married, becoming HIV activists and preserving Pedro’s legacy.
Austria’s entry for the Best International Film Oscar, “Great Freedom” is a stirring, captivating indictment of Paragraph 175, which made sex between men a crime, later expanded by the Nazis as a pretext to send queer people to concentration camps. After the war, West Germany kept the law till 1994. We follow Hans Hoffman, a gay Jewish man, rescued from a concentration camp, then sent to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. Arrested repeatedly for 20 years, he falls in love with two inmates through the years. As Hans, actor Franz Rogowski has the role of a lifetime. Not only the best gay film of 2022, but perhaps the last half decade.
Jimmy in Saigon,” another Frameline gem, is a spellbinding detective story, that explores the mysterious death, countercultural life, and forbidden romance of a 24-year-old Vietnam veteran who died in Saigon in 1972. Director Peter McDowell, Jimmy’s younger brother, begins a ten-year search, using Jimmy’s letters and interviews with family members/friends, to uncover the truth behind Jimmy’s sexual orientation and drug use, as well as discovering exactly how and why Jimmy died. It’s a heart-wrenching journey that will exert a personal impact on Peter, who’s also gay.
“The Whale“ Frazier’s, likely Oscar-winning performance has a better chance than the film which has been (over) harshly lambasted as fatphobic and voyeuristic with an overwrought, at times ponderous screenplay, penned by gay stage dramatist Samuel Hunter. It’s a hard watch for some since the issues touch some nerves or make people feel awkward but its worth the watch.
76-year-old writer/director Terence Davies’ “Benediction” chronicles the life of Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), a World War I military hero, and later one of England’s finest poets, critiquing the war. He had ill-fated romances with composer/matinee idol Ivor Novello and dilettante/author Stephen Tennant among others, but so disillusioned he married a woman aware of his homosexuality. He became a cantankerous, conservative curmudgeon/Catholic convert. A study of emotional turmoil, Davis argues sadness, regret, and survivor’s guilt hung over Sassoon’s entire life.
All Man: The International Male Story” a guilty pleasure charting the rise and fall of the monthly catalog that featured not only provocative trend-setting men’s fashions but showcased gorgeous mostly (but not all) heterosexual models setting the standard for gay male physiques in the late 70s/80s. The catalog allowed gay men to indulge their sexual fantasies plus provided a bridge for men to come out and not feel so rejected, especially in non-urban areas. And the models were hot,