Following are reviews of movies from the first week of the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, July 15-21. Up to the day of show, advance tickets may be purchased in person at all TLA Video locations (11 a.m.-10 p.m.), by phone at 267-765-9700, ext. 4 (10 a.m.-9 p.m.) and online at www.phillyfests.com (up to 36 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the appropriate venue, beginning 30 minutes before the day's first show. Tickets are $9, $8 for Philadelphia Film Society members. An asterisk (*) denotes a scheduled appearance by director or other filmmaker.

Venue Codes:

AB Arts Bank, Broad and South sts.
PMT Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.
R5 Ritz Five, 214 Walnut St.

ALMOST THERE
Joelle Alexis and Sigal Yehuda's documentary follows the lesbian couple from their home in Tel Aviv to Mykonos, Greece, where they attempt to lay down roots for a more peaceful life. Though they weren't initially planning on turning their home movies into a feature film, the couple stumbled across the visual record of their journey two years later, and decided to sort though the footage in an attempt to understand a tumultuous period in their lives. Alexis tries and fails to quit smoking en route, none of the new towns feel like home, and both women struggle with loneliness and feelings of isolation. Neither of their families has truly accepted their sexuality, and the move is a bittersweet acknowledgment that they are on their own. While the island scenery makes for a beautiful backdrop, the film's foreground remains weak. Other than the occasional touching moment, Almost There lacks real drama and the couple's self-involvement borders on the solipsistic. --Elisa Ludwig (7/18, 2:30 AB; 7/20, 5:45 AB)

ANONYMOUS
Todd Verow proves that you don't have to show yourself masturbating to make a masturbatory film, but it helps. Verow's narcissistic camera rarely strays from his own image, playing a movie theater manager named Todd (what else?), whose long-term relationship is ending thanks to his penchant for random sexual encounters. The focus here is not on the estranged lovers or on the psychology of its self-destructive hero, but on the sex acts themselves, which despite often straying into hardcore fail to relieve the gloomy tedium. The seamy DV photography suits the material, but after a dozen no-budget flicks you'd think the guy would have figured out how to record audible dialogue. Not without the occasional moment of inspiration, Anonymous is betrayed by the uncharismatic exhibitionist at its center. --Shaun Brady (7/21, 10:15 AB; 7/24, 5:30 PMT)

BEAR CUB
The first scene of Miguel Albaladejo's drama — two men graphically getting it on while a third urges them to hurry so he can finish cleaning the house — is a deceptively light beginning to what evolves into a rather serious affair. Pedro (yes, he's a bear) shoos his friends out the door because he has agreed to babysit for his nephew Bernardo while his hippie mother vacations in India. His lifestyle adjusted appropriately (no more bathhouse visits; no more joint-smoking in the house), Pedro begins to grow attached to his lovable young charge, and when Bernardo's mother is detained abroad on drug charges, Pedro begins to contemplate long-term fatherhood. Complications, of course, ensue, and the film disarmingly shifts in tone midway through. Thankfully, Albaladejo doesn't oversimplify the matter or leave us with a Three Men and a Baby resolution. --E.L. (7/17, 10:00 PMT; 7/24, 3:00 R5)

BLACK AURA ON AN ANGEL
Writer, director, producer, composer, music supervisor and star Faith Trimel should have hired a crew for this poorly acted, poorly lit, and poorly shot film about a lesbian love affair gone awry. Tarot cards and telltale names add no excitement or depth to this tawdry and high-strung tale of Trimel's character, Angel, and the frightening Phaedra, whom Angel falls in love with until Phaedra's dangerous obsessiveness takes over their relationship. Black Aura looks as if it were shot in Trimel's friends' apartments (not uncommon in low-budget filmmaking, but Trimel could have at least consulted an art director) and as if it was edited on iMovie. With a comically tragic end, Black Aura is testament to the old adage that you can't do it all. --Anita Schillhorn van Veen (7/18, 7:15 AB*; 7/22, 5:45 AB)

BLACKMAIL BOY
After their comedy Safe Sex (1999) became one of the highest-grossing films in Greek history, directing duo Thanasis Papathanasiou and Michalis Reppas turned to more serious matters in Blackmail Boy (Oxigono). This Greek drama could be considered a tragedy, though not in the classical sense. Rather than bigger-than-life characters cursed with epic problems, Blackmail Boy's characters are selfish and corrupt, trapped in their small, petty lives. A handsome young man is having an affair with an older, male married government official. When his scheming mother and brother-in-law start using him to blackmail the official, the plot — and the corruption — thickens. Despite a few trite moments, the blend of film-noir morality and family drama is darkly engaging. --A.S.v.V. (7/16, 5:15 PMT; 7/18, 7:15 R5)

THE CHILD I NEVER WAS
Narrating from prison to an unseen official, dead-faced 19-year-old Jurgen Bartsch (Tobias Schenke) intersperses stories of his unhappy family and school life with lurid descriptions of the pubescent boys he befriended, then raped and killed (or often, killed and raped). Writer-director Kai S. Pieck's film is harrowing stuff, all the more so because Bartsch was a real person — arrested in 1966 in Germany for the murder of four boys, and attempted murder of a fifth — and his confessional scenes are based on his journals and police transcripts. It's clear that Bartsch's religious surroundings turned his early teen attractions into guilt and deviancy, and cataclysmically reset his moral compass. Bartsch was a sociopath who was only incidentally homosexual; it's a shame the movie isn't screening at the Philadelphia International Serial Killer Film Fest instead. --Ryan Godfrey (7/16, 5:15 R5; 7/18, 9:30 PMT)

CLARA'S SUMMER
Summer camp, bikinis and an ambiguous attachment to a best friend are the perfect variables for an adolescent girl's lesbian awakening, even if Clara, the young, thoughtful heroine of this French drama, is slow to recognize it. When her needy best friend Zoé, rejected by camp Casanova Sébastien, makes a pass at her, Clara reacts with shame and spurns her advances. Hurt and angry, Zöe eventually reunites with Sébastien and his rowdy friends. Shy Clara is left to spend her summer alone, developing a crush on openly bisexual Sonia. Her association with Sonia has the rest of the camp suspecting her sexual inclinations before she understands them herself, and it's not long before a bunch of homophobic thugs start to torment her. (It turns out French teenagers are just as oversexed and mean as their American counterparts.) Honest and warm, Clara's Summer aptly portrays the always painful process of self-discovery. --E.L. (7/21, 8:00 AB; 7/25, 2:30 AB)

DEREK JARMAN: LIFE AS ART
Fusing a radical queer sensibility with a love of artifice and rewriting history (look what he did to Edward II), British filmmaker Derek Jarman's films defied every convention, including the conventions of rebellion. Mashing past and future, theater and painting, performance art and visual abstraction, Jarman's oeuvre is illuminated, if not exactly explained, by Andy Kimpton-Nye's fond portrait. Jarman's cinema is one of immersion — Blue (1993) reflects his AIDS-related loss of sight by restricting the image to a flat blue rectangle — so the mildly generous clip selection doesn't give much of a sense of Jarman's oeuvre. Fortunately, frequent collaborators like Tilda Swinton and Simon Fisher Turner pay tribute to Jarman's singularity, though without a voice to put Jarman's films in context, Life as Art is more of an elegy than a full-fledged biography. --Sam Adams (7/18, 12:15 AB)

A FEW GOOD DYKES
With amateurish good nature, Mocha Jean Herrup documents the Dyke Uniform Corps, a lesbian club devoted to military rigor, hierarchy and fashion. At first Herrup's disregard for filmmaking fundamentals — like cleaning the camera lens — is off-putting, but the candidness of Herrup's subjects and her intriguing subject matter win out over time. Exploring gender identification and the mix of power and eroticism in the lesbian community, A Few Good Dykes demonstrates a genuine interest in and a sense of humor about its subject. And though it concerns a fetish for military uniforms, it doesn't fetishize the Dyke Uniform Corps to the point where it blurs the issues and problems faced by DUC's members. --A.S.v.V. (7/20, 10:15 AB; 7/24, 7:45 PMT)

GOLDFISH MEMORY
An aging Irish college professor impresses his female protegees with the knowledge that goldfish have a memory span of three seconds, suggesting humans adopt a similarly in-the-moment approach. But no one in this drama gets the chance to put his wisdom to the test, since their relationships last two and a half seconds, tops. The professor's lover Clara has a lesbian affair with Angie, who has an affair with her gay best friend Red, who is trying to seduce a straight man, and so on until the entanglements require a flowchart. Love, to these attractive and occasionally desperate characters, is more important than sexuality, and almost everyone is willing to experiment in the name of emotional intimacy. With so many plotlines vying for screen time, few of these couplings feel fully developed — even when they last longer than a night. Nevertheless, Goldfish Memory is an insightful, entertaining portrait of the neurotic obstacles that lie in the way of romance. --E.L. (7/17, 7:30 R5; 7/18, 2:30 R5)

GRAND ÉCOLE
Adopted from a play by Jean-Marie Besset, Grande 'cole explores the world of privileged students in business school and their dangerous intersections of power, class, race and sexuality. Paul is dating Agnés, but he is also attracted to his wealthy, charming roommate Louis-Arnault. When Agnés challenges him, Dangerous Liaisons-style, to act on his urges and test the strength of their bond, Paul is conflicted. In the meantime, he begins to investigate his gay tendencies by conducting an affair with Mécir, a North African laborer, while Agnés threatens to sleep with Louis-Arnault herself. Tracing the familiar but always rich territory of adolescence, Robert Salis' film is frank and engaging. Fluent acting and artful sex scenes make the endless, constantly mutating erotic tension between characters believable. Less compelling is the heavy-handed social message: The film sometimes seems to reinforce the very inequities it interrogates. --E.L. (7/16, 7:30 R5; 7/18, 12:15 PMT)

IMMEDIATE BOARDING
Ella Lemhagen's cross-dressing Parent Trap follows the '70s Disney model right down to its family-friendly blandness, but manages to charm nonetheless. Amanda Davin is impressive in a dual role as 11-year-old look-alikes who decide to swap lives while each is being shipped between divorced parents. Perched at the cusp of adolescent sexual awakening, effeminate Martin and tomboy Julia struggle to find their own identities while role-playing the opposite sex and discovering that adults really haven't figured this stuff out either. Martin's adventures with Julia's family are strictly sitcom-broad, but Jørgen Langhelle plays Martin's rugged father as a confused man who loves but doesn't understand his son, and his scenes with Julia-as-Martin are the film's heart. --S.B. (7/17, 12:15 R5; 7/18, 5:00 R5)

IN GOOD CONSCIENCE: SISTER JEANNINE GRAMICK'S JOURNEY OF FAITH
A quiet radical, Sister Jeannine Gramick has devoted her life to creating a place for gays and lesbians in the Roman Catholic Church. Emmy-award winner Barbara Rick follows the Philadelphia-born nun as she spreads the word, co-founding the gay-friendly New Ways Ministry and traveling around the country to talk to church leaders and gay Catholics about building bridges in the religious community. When the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith demands that she stop openly discussing homosexuality, Gramick refuses to be silenced, and instead voices her conviction that God is inclusive and doesn't, as Fred Phelps would have it, "hate fags." On the heels of the abuse scandal, In Good Conscience raises important questions about morality and leadership within the Church. Gramick is a likable, enigmatic figure and her fearless drive to challenge the Vatican — what, except for total faith, might give a person such courage? — makes for compelling subject matter. --E.L. (7/17, 2:30 AB*; 7/22, 7:30 PMT*)

INTENTIONS
A young lesbian breaks up with her controlling girlfriend to pursue a career in theater, and finds herself having an affair with her director, a married woman. The story is conventional to the point of banality, with all the typical signifiers of a manipulative relationship and an unsatisfying marriage pushing the two main characters to their tryst, which is characterized by walks in the park, talk over ice cream and a painfully romantic love-scene score. In the midst of all this Hallmark sincerity, the most ironic moment is when the aspiring actress is discussing a play with her soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend and says, "The acting was great." --A.S.v.V. (7/20, 8:00 AB; 7/24, 12:30 AB)

JAILBAIT
Confined to a prison cell and heavy on uncomfortable silences, writer-director Brett C. Leonard's debut is inertly impressive, and vice versa. Michael Pitt, who looks more like rough trade with every movie, is the new fish, a petty offender three-striked into a 25-year bit. Stephen Adly-Guirgis is his large, friendly cellmate, whose sadism is initially confined to long bouts of garrulousness, but when he tells Pitt to tie his shirttails in a knot, you know he won't have to ask twice. Like Genet on meth, Leonard clutters his deliberately stifling compositions with a flood of talk, much of it pouring out of Adly-Guirgis, who never generates the requisite sexual menace. --S.A. (7/18, 7:15 PMT*; 7/20, 5:00 R5*)

LOCKED UP: SEXUAL ASSAULT BEHIND BARS
With its flatly lit video imagery and copious nudity, Jörg Andreas' first attempt at non-adult film resembles nothing more than a porn with the naughty bits snipped out. But while sex is kept fastidiously off-screen, the degradation is decidedly hardcore; there's no fakery when a group of men urinate on a fellow inmate. (Is this what Germans call going mainstream?) Imprisoned for credit card fraud, inexperienced Dennis (Marcel Schlutt) strikes up an idyllic romance with black American Mike (Mike Sale) that at times verges on the absurd — they first make googly-eyes at each other while Mike beats a man who owes him money. Andreas struggles to depict blossoming love amid the drugs and shower-room rape, yet never seems fully comfortable with his newfound chastity. --S.B. (7/20, 7:15 R5; 7/24, 9:30 AB)

LOVE IN THOUGHTS
If I've learned one thing from the movies, it's that one should never accept an invitation from one's wealthy, preternaturally pretty, slightly incestuous sibling friends for an unsupervised weekend at their parents' summer home. Set in 1920s Berlin and inspired by a real-life incident, Love In Thoughts announces its murderous outcome in a police station prologue, leaving the film-length flashback to fill in the details. Brooding poet Paul (Daniel Bruehl) is infatuated with Hilde (Anna Maria Möhe), who is having an affair with Hans (Thure Lindhardt), ex-lover of her gay, and somewhat unbalanced, brother Guenther (August Diehl). Director Achim von Borries layers on the tragic romanticism as the principals philosophize Leopold and Loeb-style regarding conceptual vs. actual love and murder. We all know where that leads. --S.B. (7/16, 7:30 PMT; 7/17, 5:15 R5)

ON THE DOWNLOW
Tadeo Garcia's searing tale of furtive love between two gang members plays like West Side Story without the finger snaps, the musical interludes and the girl named Maria. Originally from different parts of Chicago and flashing different gang signs, Angel (Michael Cortez) and Isaac (Tony Sancho) soon develop a friendship that turns into a full-on love affair, and Angel invites Isaac to leave the Latin Kings and join the Two-Six. Needless to say, Isaac's previous civic affiliation is not the only secret the pair has to keep from Reaper and his posse. Performed by non-actors and grittily shot on Super-16 in gang neighborhoods, Downlow at times could pass for verite. Not that we want this story of tragic machismo to be any more real. --R.G. (7/19, 7:30 PMT; 7/20, 5:15 PMT*)

THE RASPBERRY REICH
Together at last: Herbert Marcuse and hardcore porn. Provocateur Bruce LaBruce returns with a double-barreled blast of social astringent, set among a group of inept would-be terrorists. Quoting heavily from Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, meister-frau Gudrun (Suzanne Sachsse) schools her baby Baader-Meinhoffs in the ABCs of revolutionary sex. Heterosexuality and the missionary position are bourgeois vices, "Fuck me up against the wall, motherfucker" her rallying cry. Befitting its title, Raspberry is a crude provocation; superimposing Marx over a fuck scene does not a dialectic make. Still, you've got to admire LaBruce's audacity, at least until the shock wears off. --S.A. (7/20, 9:30 R5; 7/22, 9:45 PMT)

SHINER
Christian Calson's debut film treads the darker side of sexuality, his characters slipping beyond your standard sadomasochistic deviance into brutal, almost unspeakable violence. Elaine is a misanthrope who enjoys slapping around her boyfriends in bed, usually provoking a reciprocal response. Her roommate Tony and his friend Danny go out and beat up gay men; at home Danny eggs Tony on until he beats him bloody, the only way Danny can climax. Tim, a boxer and friend of Danny's, is tired of being stalked by a gay gym attendant, so he flips the script and tries to threaten his stalker. Shiner is rough around the edges and often difficult to watch, but Calson, trolling the very lowest reaches of human nature, taps into a morbid car-crash kind of curiosity that will keep some viewers riveted in spite of an equally strong urge to look away. --E.L. (7/16, 10:00 PMT*; 7/18, 5:00 PMT*)

STRAIGHT OUT: STORIES FROM ICELAND
Living in frozen nowhere, rural Icelanders have as much right to be as trepid as the next Vilhjálmur about coming out, I suppose. Still, though isolated, they are surrounded by Scandinavians — not generally the most intolerant lot — and Iceland was the first country to allow gay couples to adopt, nearly 10 years ago. That said, every gay culture deserves to add its stories to the coming-out canon, and here are nine of Iceland's, as collected in talking-head format by documentarians Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdõttir and Thorvaldur Kristinsson. If the stories seem a bit bland and uniform — initial feelings of confusion and loneliness, followed by finding like-aligned peers, then announcements to concerned but ultimately supportive and loving family and friends — try subsisting on dried herring for six straight months of winter. --R.G. (7/17, 12:15 AB)

SUMMER THUNDER
Fading porn star Fox E. Bottoms (Matthew Sandager) has a secret: He's the grown-up incarnation of Bloody Billy Tucker, the 8-year-old who tragically experienced extreme hot tub circumcision and became a talk show staple in the '80s. The premise, along with characters like Daniel the Camel and Teacup Tony, may be enough to take the edge off John Waters cravings, but — like Fox, the mangled trauma queen — the film is not what you would call load-bearing. Strangely, given the subject matter and the garish DV lensing, writer-director Spencer Lee Schilly opts to play Billy's story for pathos rather than comedy whenever possible. The result is an interesting failure — call it Dogme camp — that manages simultaneous turgidity and flaccidness. --R.G. (7/17, 12:15 PMT; 7/20, 9:45 PMT*)

SUPERSTAR IN A HOUSEDRESS
Six-feet-plus and "built like a linebacker," Jackie Curtis was never going to win points for realness, but according to fellow Warhol "superstar" Penny Arcade, authenticity was never the point. In and out of drag, Curtis scribbled speed-fueled plays and poetry (Patti Smith and Robert De Niro were early co-stars), starred in Warhol's Women in Revolt and cultivated a forcibly unkempt look, slathering on makeup until it caked and going days in the same shredded gown. As playwright Michael Arian recalls, "You could smell Jackie underneath the glamour." The drag wasn't always female, either: as memorialized in "Walk on the Wide Side," Curtis did his best to be "James Dean for a day." Craig Highberger rounds up an impressive array of Curtis' living contemporaries: Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallessandro, Holly Woodlawn, Harvey Fierstein and Lily Tomlin (who also narrates). --S.A. (7/18, 9:30 R5; 7/22, 5:15 R5)

WILD SIDE
A cross between Patrice Chéreau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train and Son Frére, Sébastien Lifshitz's second feature at least draws inspiration from the best. Lifshitz (Come Undone) limns the relationship between a transgendered prostitute (Stéphanie Michelini), an Arab hustler (Yasmine Belmadi) and a Russian immigrant (Edouard Nikitine), who leave the city to attend to Michelini's dying mother. Lifshitz's prismatic filmmaking, which mingles moments from all three characters' pasts, mirrors the egality of their present-tense relationship. --S.A. (7/21, 9:45 R5; 7/25, 5:00 PMT)