Kansas City Gay & Lesbian Film Festival
Chris & Don: A Love Story
Tina Mascara and Guido Santi’s documentary is a charming, illuminating portrait of the complex and storied queer romance between literary icon Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy, who met on a Santa Monica beach in 1952, when Bachardy was a teenager and Isherwood 30 years his senior. Quilted from black-and-white home-movie clips, animated sequences that bring to life the duo’s correspondence and pet names, and original footage of the now-elderly Bachardy going about his daily routine, Chris & Don uses standard documentary techniques to celebrate men who flaunted all the rules. — Ernest Hardy
The Edge of Heaven
Writer-director Fatih Akin’s movie feels out the state of German-Turkish relationships as the former Ottomans clean house for European Union membership and the demographic earthquake of 70 million Muslims waits at the continent’s door. Akin’s superficial lunges at visual artistry and his facile, pseudo-provocative screenplay (a Dickensian network of happenstance) add up to the conclusion that Europe has its very own Paul Haggis. — Nick Pinkerton
A Jihad for Love
Muslims, Jews and Christians may have their occasional differences, but as an Islamic scholar observes early in Parvez Sharma’s documentary, there is one point on which the world’s divine religions agree: Homosexuality is a crime. The movie follows gay, lesbian and transvestite Muslims abroad who hew to their faith in the face of hostile dogma. Sharma leaves open a provocative question: If you pick and choose which tenets of a religion apply to you, is it still a religion? — Jim Ridley
Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon
This puff piece, which is about as single-minded as an excited phallus, traces Jack Wrangler’s rise from a no-name thespian in rat-infested Manhattan to one of the first superstars of gay porn, ending with a phew from the man that he dodged AIDS. Wrangler’s need to be lusted after connects with the similar wants of other old-school queer sex symbols such as Peter Berlin, but the film doesn’t care about assessing this narcissism (or rationalizing Wrangler’s nutty marriage to singer Margaret Whiting). Wrangler’s schlong, though, gets major play via scuzzy film clips. — Ed Gonzalez
