It’s a strange summer for Roland Emmerich, gay German doyen of the action ridicu-spectacle. Practically unnoticed beneath the bang and clatter of his daft Independence Day sequel, his passion project, Stonewall (Metrodome, 15), slips straight to DVD tomorrow. A clumsy but oddly endearing fictionalisation of 1969’s LGBT riots in Greenwich Village, it was irrecoverably lambasted at last year’s Toronto film festival. Not without reason either: it’s a cosy, cliche-reliant telling of a still-nervy slice of social history, filtering its tale of outsider representation through the Colgate-white perspective of Jeremy Irvine’s hero.
Rejigging facts to let an indecently chiselled midwest farmboy cast the first Stonewall stone, among other cornball artistic liberties, is a clear own goal on Emmerich and writer Jon Robin Baitz’s part. But the sentimental virtues of the film-makers’ approach survive their own worst impulses. It’s a film told with a warm, affectionate sense of community, easy to denigrate by those who know the Stonewall story inside out, but emotionally accessible to those with more to learn.
Pair it up with Holding the Man (Peccadillo, 15), another soft-but-sweet-centred period tale of gay self-realisation. Drawn from the late Australian writer Tim Conigrave’s bestselling memoir of his 15-year romance with boyfriend John Caleo, initiated on the school football field and continuing through the Aids crisis of the 1980s, Neil Armfield’s brightly lit, tenderly performed film eschews the gut-spilling emotional candour of his excellent 2006 junkie love story, Candy. Its gentle, unpretentious empathy prickles the tear ducts all the same.
Withholding less on its queer subject is Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (Dogwoof, 18). A frank, saucily absorbing documentary study of the American photographer, whose pristine images of swollen appendages and S&M activities, among other subjects, inspired heated political debates about public arts funding, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s film examines his work with as sharp an eye as it does his rollicking personal life.
Amid this wealth of gay-focused titles, it would be tempting to write that the week’s most homoerotic release is actually Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Warner, 12), but that would be attributing a level of wit and sensual awareness to Zack Snyder’s pompous, honkingly ugly superhero conference that is far beyond its skill set. As it is, it’s hard to add much to the critical drubbing it deservedly met with in cinemas. Presuming that the meeting of two equally stolid, overworked caped crusaders is enough of an event to magic a sense of purpose into a narrative devoid of urgency, this is effectively a cinematic Spaghetti Junction: noisy, busy, full of converging vehicles with somewhere else to go (hi, Wonder Woman!), but nothing like a destination in itself.
There are higher-octane action kicks to be had in Ilya Naishuller’s Hardcore Henry (EIV, 18), an enthusiastically antic sci-fi thriller shot entirely from its unspeaking soldier protagonist’s perspective. Aping the form of first-person shooters, it’s hardly an unprecedented gimmick, though the film’s cocky enough – wearisomely so, in the long run – to have you believe otherwise.
Re-release of the week is a smart polish-up of John Schlesinger’s 1962 social-realist classic A Kind of Loving (Studiocanal, 15) – not that you’d want to remove too much grain or grit from this scuffed, scowling drama of a rocky shotgun marriage. If the film has retained slightly less of its brute impact over the decades than some of its kitchen-sink contemporaries, Alan Bates’s hot, roiling presence in the lead is intact.
Finally, the week’s best streaming news concerns Film4’s heavily stuffed back catalogue, from which 39 films, never previously available for digital download, are hitting iTunes and Amazon . The selection runs the gamut from Alice, Czech stop-motion master Jan Švankmajer’s marvellous adult Wonderland riff, to Julien Temple’s starry, jangly rockumentary Joe Strummer, as well as a couple of titles currently unavailable even on DVD. Those in the latter group include Andrew Bujalski’s still-winning mumblecore standard-setters Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation. But the most unexpected excavation is Claude Chabrol’s shadow-washed curio Dr M, a Fritz Lang-inspired noir nightmare fronted by a more weathered Alan Bates. Get digging.
