Following are reviews of movies premiering in the first week of the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, July 13-19. Up to the day of show, tickets may be purchased in person at TLA Video locations (11 a.m.-10 p.m.), by phone at 267-765-9700, ext. 4, and online at www.phillyfests.org (up to 24 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the screening venue. Tickets are $9.50. Coverage continues next week.

All times are p.m. An asterisk (*) indicates scheduled appearance by director or other guest.

Recommended | Venue Codes: PMT = Prince Music Theater 1412 Chestnut St.

AB = Arts Bank 601 S. Broad St. • WT = Wilma Theater 256 S. Broad St.

Amnesia

Inspired by real events, Amnesia tells the story of a man who awakens naked on a Montreal street having forgotten everything except for the fact that he's gay. Denis Langlois' take on the case is a unique approach to the issue of sexual identity, prompting questions about the links between sexuality and personality. Subtitled The James Brighton Enigma, Langlois' film ties the enigma up a touch too straightforwardly, with the hints and clues throughout turning out to be almost exactly what they seem. But while memory remains elusive, Dusan Dukic's lead performance has just the right blend of puppy-dog innocence and flash point rage to play with the audience's trust, navigating the waters between Memento and Mr. Ripley. —Shaun Brady (7/15, 12:30 PMT; 7/17, 9:30 PMT)

Beyond Conception: Men Having Babies

Having a baby seems like a relatively simple process, at least until there are four parents and no sex involved whatsoever. Johnny Symons' documentary follows Bruce and Paul, a gay couple trying to have a child through Jennifer, a surrogate mother, who wishes in turn to experience pregnancy with her new partner Jenna. While dealing with the hot-button issue of gay parenthood, the film does an excellent job at shifting away from the obvious complexities to display the realistic and emotional sides of two-man parenthood. Mapping the process through a selection of personal moments and interviews, Symons plunges viewers into his subjects' lives with little introduction, making it hard to form that first connection. But by the birth, it's easy to see how the struggle of parenthood really brings everyone closer together, including the audience. —Alex Shebar (7/15, 12:30 PMT)

The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros

Aureaus Solito's gorgeous debut charts the unfolding bond between a preteen trannie and a possibly closeted cop. Following its slim-hipped hero(ine) through the streets of Manila, Blossoming plays like a nonlethal Cavite, hungrily drinking in the texture of Filipino life. Solito doesn't get locked into a realist style — he's not afraid to have Maxi and his friends stage a beauty pageant for the camera, or slip in a poster for Gone with the Macho when Maxi visits a bootleg "DVD house." But the tenor of Maxi's home life, even the way his small-time crook father and brothers take his transvestism for granted, feels utterly unforced — so much so that it's a shame when the movie spins out into a cookie-cutter crime plot. —Sam Adams (7/17, 7:15 PMT; 7/19, 5:00 PMT)

Colma: The Musical

Beginning with a song cleverly detailing the stasis of its titular California town ("New York's got New Jersey/ San Francisco's got the place where Colma stays"), one-time-Philadelphian H.P. Mendoza's indie-pop musical eventually settles into the circular ennui that its characters spend their time bemoaning. Mendoza's schizophrenic writing is more naturalistic in the lyrics than the dialogue; the musical numbers are rich in slice-of-life snapshots, but the just-graduated leads already seem to have their memories clouded with ironic John Hughes distance. Both first-timers, Mendoza and director Richard Wong make the rookie mistake of indulging every idea, setting the final third adrift with too many midtempo songs sounding like filler from latter-day They Might Be Giants albums, and scene after scene of characters telling each other what's already happened. —S.B. (7/15, 7:00 WT*; 7/16, 2:30 WT*)

In the post-Brokeback world, gay cowboys are nearly ubiquitous, apparently to the point where you can pick one up on the road and take him home. Gregory Christian casts himself as a closeted husband who does likewise, installing his shirtless young hustler in a guest house as the family gardener. His pill-popping wife, whose film-student nightmares lack only the de rigueur midget, is oblivious not only to her sex-averse husband's sexuality but to the suspicious way that hitting a "deer" sent him into a year's worth of therapy. But her cluelessness is essential to the ludicrous final revelation, as is the young cowboy's gun, which has to withstand a few too many phallic metaphors before it finally goes off. —S.B. (7/14, 9:30 AB; 7/16, 9:30 WT)

Nothing's less funny than intentional camp, and if you hadn't guessed from the title and the premise of gay party-crashing zombies, this film is swimming in it. While the amateur hour production must have devolved regularly into uncontrollable giggling, the amusement is limited to cast, crew and their closest friends. Chris Diani's limp-wristed parody takes all the obvious swipes at '50s culture, zombie flicks and sniping queens, minus a single original idea or fresh joke. Over the course of a mercifully short (yet still far too long) 72 minutes, five old stereotypes, er, friends, reunite for a Boys in the Band-style party, crashed soon enough by a batch of walking dead who can only be deterred by bad cologne. If clumsily read one-liners, bad wigs and over-the-top gore are your idea of a good time — no, still avoid this. —S.B. (7/18, 9:30 AB*; 7/22, 9:30 AB*)

Time to start lobbying Congress to ban plastic fangs; vampire movies are just too cheap to produce. Joe Sullivan's debut posits an alliance between the undead, evangelical Christians and a well-financed right-wing militia group scheming to overthrow the country by turning gays into blood-suckers — and sets the whole thing in one Manhattan bar. Some sort of grudging respect has to be given to Sullivan for an audacious scenario wherein his heroes — a gay secret agent, his Broadway dancer lover, an uptight accountant and his even more uptight wife — manage to elude the immortal vamps and the heavily armed militants while sticking primarily to a single staircase. Unfortunately, his broad satire merely mashes a bunch of caricatures together rather than finding some equivalence among the villains a la John Carpenter's Republicans-are-aliens They Live. —S.B. (7/19, 9:30 AB*; 7/23, 7:15 PMT*)

Carlos Portugal's debut is set in East L.A., where a predominantly Latino neighborhood is being gentrified by white gay couples. Young and sensitive Diego works at his mother's restaurant while secretly having an affair with Pedro, a macho realtor with a penchant for role-play. When Pedro dumps Diego for the latter's wannabe socialite aunt, Diego seeks solace in his gringo neighbor. But the course of true love never did run smooth; racial, sexual and familial tensions immediately thwart Diego's newfound romance. René Alvarado's boyishly charming Diego, combined with a talented supporting cast and consistent comic relief, make Carlos Portugal's debut film a pretty decent date movie. —Termeh Mazhari (7/15, 12:15 WT*; 7/16, 7:15 WT*)

Set Madrid in 1981, Chus Guttiérez's movie focuses on the eponymous club and its house band, the Suix. When their bandmate jumps ship, the remaining girls (pixie-on-speed Leo and moody, controlling Carmen) scramble for a replacement and stumble upon the virginal Sara. Drama arises when their big gig happens to fall on the same day as the attempted military coup (known as 23-F) that threatens their recently democratized livelihoods. Short on both character and plot depth, El Calentito is more interesting for its historical backdrop than the story in the foreground. —Molly Eichel (7/16, 7:15 AB; 7/19, 5:00 AB)

"I might be hung like a gerbil, but I've got a cock," explains Casey, a gender-bending transman in a polyamorous relationship with a conventionally pretty sex worker. This proclamation comes before his lady drives needles through his thimble dick and after she showers him with piss. Although Luke Woodward's debut at times feels as sterile as a Trannie 101 class (a dominant partner in a pansexual trifecta actually explains what "FTM" stands for, as if the movie's audience wouldn't already know), Enough Man undeniably takes viewers a place many have never been — into the drawers of nine sex-positive transmen. Head-cocking moments abound as Woodward's subjects unzip the myth that gender queer is all theory and no play; prudish sorts should be warned that scenes of fucking, talking about fucking, fisting, boot licking and light BDSM are par for the course. But for all his taboo-shattering bravado, Woodward sadly glosses over his most interesting interviewee: a soft-spoken transman living with HIV in a community that still thinks it's more or less immune. —Ashlea Halpern (7/16, 5:15 PMT)

A bizarre collage of indie film cliches, Flirting opens in the bloody milieu of director Christian Calson's previous film, Shiner. Anthony (singer Daniel Cartier) is kidnapped by a gang in retaliation for a job gone wrong, then beaten and tortured to a heavy metal soundtrack. The gruesome S&M fantasy ends when Anthony is freed by the gang leader, Jack, and they take turns raping Anthony's tormentor. Years later, Anthony is living with his girlfriend Donna when a family death prompts them to drive cross-country for the funeral. From here, Flirting unspools into a random series of road trip encounters with "wacky" characters, including someone who looks a lot like Jack. Unfortunately flat performances, weak dialogue and little-to-no character development make the film's excesses gratuitous. —Elisa Ludwig (7/15, 9:30 AB*; 7/16, 5:00 AB*)

Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher

Inspired by a drug-fueled revelation, Lonnie Frisbee left the streets of San Francisco to preach the gospel. But instead of cutting his hair and slapping on a suit, Frisbee became a marquee preacher for the Jesus Movement, whose hippiefied (and -fried) evangelism got Time talking Christianity long before the culture wars. Just one hitch: Frisbee was gay, and after a decade of trying to play it straight, he was drummed out of the movement he'd helped build, poisoned by bitterness and then by HIV. David Di Sabatino's "Bible story" is cagey on the subject of Frisbee's "sin," neither condemning nor precisely endorsing, and sometimes skirting the subject altogether. But if Frisbee seems aimed more at evangelical progressives than queer-fest devotees, it's an unmistakable olive branch stretched across a gulf that often seems unbridgeable. —S.A. (7/16, 7:30 PMT)

Gypo

Director Jan Junn delivers an oddly affecting portrait of the relationship between a young refugee and a working-class English family. Fortysomething Helen is fed up with working nights at a grocery store, trying to make ends meet and caring for her granddaughter. Her husband Paul, miserable with his own life, cruelly derides her when he's not out picking up hookers. The "everything changes" moment comes when their 18-year-old daughter meets Tasha, a Romany Czech living in a nearby trailer park, and brings her home, detonating Paul's racism and engaging Helen's sympathy. Adhering to the Dogme 95 tenets of "pure" filmmaking, Junn trains his handheld camera on each of his three central characters, and tells the story Rashomon -style, carefully and quietly building tension along the way. —E.L. (7/17, 7:15 AB; 7/21, 5:00 AB)

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis

Mary Jordan's definitive doc is a sweeping memento of the ultimate termite artist, one who had he his druthers would have left naught behind but rumor. Jordan ably charts a course to Smith's epochal 1963 Flaming Creatures, a phantasmagoric brew of Renaissance pornography and drag performance that was banned in nearly half the nation. But Destruction's greatest insights arrive after the heyday of Smith's fleeting fame. Warhol repackaged Smith's baroque provocations as anti-art, and a feud with Jonas Mekas fueled Smith's distrust of the institutional art world. Calling for MoMA's demolition and becoming obsessed with freeing himself from the restraints of capitalism, Smith, in John Waters' words, "bit every hand that could ever, ever feed him." Determined not to create fixed works that could be exploited by others, Smith staged live-edited film shows that ran for hours (at least, when they started at all). Jordan salvages invaluable scraps from Smith's evanescent late works and fills a critical hole in the history of avant-garde film. —S.A. (7/17, 9:30 AB; 7/23, 5:00 PMT)

The Line of Beauty

Based on Alan Hollingurst's Booker Prize-winning novel, this seamless BBC mini-series (running three hours in toto) charts the life of Nick, a working-class gay man who goes home with his wealthy college friend on a family visit and never leaves. It's the cocaine-soaked 1980s, Margaret Thatcher is the prime minister, and Nick is enjoying the spoils of Tory power in the Fedden household. Maintaining his gay identity, at first a matter of sneaking out to meet his lover, becomes increasingly complicated as the reality of AIDS sets in and the bigotry of his adopted world becomes more evident. When the Feddens are beset by financial and political scandal, Nick is forced to decide who he is and where he stands. —E.L. (7/15, 1:15 AB; 7/18, 6:00 WT)

Bruno Todeschini and L'Enfant's Jérémie Renier play lovers whose tenuous tenure in Pétainist Paris is thrown off-balance by the arrival of Louise Monot's fugitive Jew. Less a love triangle than a series of overlapping alliances, the threesome's relationships shift and mutate over the course of newcomer Christian Fauré's too-tasteful drama, which only draws blood sketching Renier's collaborateur brother. Ending with a caption touting the well-established Nazi persecution of homosexuals as if it's fresh news, A Love to Hide is a protest picture several decades too late. —S.A. (7/18, 5:15 AB; 7/19, 7:15 WT)

A thriller devoid of any suspense beyond whose pants will come off next, OpenCam is plotted like porn but poses as a murder mystery. Director Robert Gaston's priorities are epitomized by his casting of Andreau Thomas, who must only have auditioned below the neck. Playing a vapid pretty-boy painter given to trite political art and going commando, Thomas mumbles through the part, never mustering the least bit of concern that everyone he sleeps with (i.e., pretty much everyone in the cast) winds up dead. The plot centers on a live chat site, which makes for excruciatingly extended scenes of men masturbating in tiny desktop windows while IM boings flood the soundtrack. All the fun of watching someone else surf the net while playing a half-hearted game of Clue. —S.B. (7/19, 9:30 WT*; 7/24, 8:15 WT*)

Creator Mike Reiss is a Simpsons alum, but this flailing satire is Family Guy all the way. Shoveling feeble joke after feeble joke — Michael Jackson is weird! Rosie O'Donnell is fat! — Reiss' flaming flame-out feels like the result of a brainstorming session attended by too few brains. (Perhaps the manatees were sick that day.) There's a plot, sort of, in which Q.D. (Jim J. Bullock) ditches his boytoy Openly Gator (a Paul Lynde-biting Billy West) for aging movie queen Lola Buzzard (Jackie Hoffman). But in a world where characters eat Quentin Crisps and drink Harvey Milk, any foray into heterosexuality is bound to be brief. The movie's copious musical numbers liven the mood, but the sex-obsessed single entendres rapidly become a drag. Xeth Feinberg's animation is no cruder than South Park's, but the script might as well have been written in crayon. —S.A. (7/15, 2:30 WT*; 7/17, 9:30 WT*)

This Mondo Homophobia travelogue opens by rhetorically asking if, in the wake of greater acceptance and the advent of gay marriage, there's still any need for gay activism in Europe. Since a "no" would hardly make for compelling viewing, directors Jochen Hick and Christian Jentzsch proceed to provide examples of intolerance throughout the continent, framed by the story of a British man fighting to save his Belarusian boyfriend from deportation. Narrated by a dry, dispassionate voice straight out of a BBC nature special (or a Teletubbies episode), the film's objective documentary feel is belied by a call-to-arms structure, concentrating especially on a pair of gay-rights groups to the point where it feels like paid advertising. —S.B. (7/15, 5:00 PMT)

Rock Bottom

Jay Corcoran's gay-men-and-meth doc looks as if it were shot on a Webcam, and its structure is shaky as hell, but its stories are too alarming to be ignored. Opening in a bathroom stall, where HIV-positive ex-porn actor CJ proclaims himself "really high, really horny, and out of it," Rock Bottom positions itself as Scared Straight for cranked-out barebackers, spreading across a wide spectrum of age, class and race. Observers, who are only sporadically identified, paint "Tina" as the ultimate, which is to say most dangerous, drug for the gay community, prolonging sex, reducing inhibitions, and overriding feelings of self-doubt and exclusion. As one user puts it, "It's the perfect drug for an HIV-positive gay man in a midlife crisis." Scariest of all is the hot, cavalier would-be singer who continues to proclaim his resistance on camera, even as his physical state clearly reveals an addiction in the offing. —S.A. (7/16, 12:30 PMT; 7/17, 5:00 AB)

Saint of 9/11

The first registered casualty of 9/11, Father Mychal Judge was instantly acclaimed a hero, and just as quickly turned into a locus of controversy. Gay activists started calling Judge, who was out but celibate, the first openly gay saint, while hard-line Catholics denied he'd ever been gay, or at least that he entered the priesthood to atone for it. Glenn Holsten's documentary puts Judge's good works first — his trips to Northern Ireland with a paraplegic NYPD officer, his early ministry to AIDS patients, not to mention his service as a fire department chaplain, the capacity in which he was serving when he was fatally struck by falling rubble. But the film's subjects attest that Judge was open about his sexuality when it counted, inviting a gay couple to dance at his "Irishman of the Year" ceremony. Saint could use more color and less canon; at times, it's a little too much like being in Sunday school. But it's a solemn and reverent tribute to a man who clearly merits it. —S.A. (7/14, 7:15 AB*)

This is certainly not the first time that vampirism has been equated with STDs, but it's probably the most literal-minded. Thomas Jason Davis' debut dispenses with the mythological in favor of the scatological, detailing physical transformations in repulsive detail and name-checking the few bodily fluids that don't make an onscreen appearance. (Whether these undead can survive the sunlight is never addressed, but given their nocturnal club existence, it's kind of a non-issue.) The attempt seems inspired by David Cronenberg, but instead of the transcendent possibilities of physical mutation, Scab, as implied by the title, focuses on the shock value of base carnality, the dried-up aftereffects of physical interaction. —S.B. (7/16, 9:30 AB*; 7/23, 2:30 PMT*)

Based on the novel by Richard Stevenson, this made-for-TV mystery mixes one-dimensional characters and cliche storylines, but every time the movie begins to drag, an explosion of tacky theme music and death ropes you back in. Shock sends detective Donald Strachey (Chad Allen, reprising his Third Man Out role) undercover inside an "ex-gay" treatment center after his newest client, and their star patient, suspiciously ODs. The movie holds your attention when it focuses on the peculiarities of being an openly gay P.I.: boyfriends who get mad when you miss movie night, office assistants who volunteer details of their sex life to help solve a crime. The casting of Morgan Fairchild as the lush anti-gay mother of the dead client is the cherry on the top of this fun, yet extremely cheesy, cake. —A.S. (7/17, 7:15 WT*; 7/19, 5:00 WT*)

Unraveled and restitched since its festival debut, Thom Fitzgerald's turgid AIDS quilt lays out three disparate dramas end to end. (Although the daisy-chain version is labeled the "director's cut," the original featured a more ambitious interwoven structure, which might explain this cut's jumpiness and uneven pacing.) In China, Lucy Liu plays a black-market bloodsucker conning peasants into opening their veins for pennies on the pint; in Montreal, Shawn Ashmore is a porn actor who's been pilfering his invalid dad's blood to cover the fact that he's HIV-positive; and in rural South Africa, Chloë Sevigny, Sandra Oh and Olympia Dukakis play nuns battling tribal superstition and white indifference. A barely competent filmmaker in the best of circumstances, Fitzgerald is hopelessly outmatched by his ambitious subject; the commonalities between the stories are so superficial, what results is not a unified vision of a global epidemic but a soft-focus smear. —S.A. (7/15, 7:15 PMT*; 7/16, 4:30 PMT)

Tailor-made for the Priscilla crowd, this Spanish-language pastiche is a two-hour exercise in neutered camp. Directed by Ramón Salazar, it stars Mónica Cervera as Marieta, a narcoleptic, transsexual hooker who takes baths with a moody, cello-playing dwarf (Miguel O'Dogherty) but falls in love with a beat-boxing, Kawasaki-driving stock boy (Pablo Puyol). But wait — it gets worse. When Marieta's not obsessing over hacking off her eight angry inches, she's bust-a-moving through the sort of P.S.1 choreography that smacks of drag night at a dive bar. Gratuitous butt sex aside, the musical salute to pop culture (1960s girl groups, Madonna and Thriller-era Michael Jackson get a less-than-subtle nod) verges on embarrassing — where Bollywood spins gold of the American dream, 20 Centimeters amounts to little more than Hedwig lite. It's bound to pick up a cult following, of course, which is a testament to its sheer awfulness. (7/16, 9:15 PMT; 7/19, 9:30 PMT) —A.H.

Two Drifters

Tightening the reins from his first feature, 2000's eroto-scatological O Fantasma, João Pedro Rodrigues' sophomore salvo is still a wildly unhinged fantasia. In its opening minutes, brooding, muscle-bound Rui (Nuno Gil) shares an aching tender moment with his boyfriend of one year, then hears the crash of his car just around the corner. As he cradles his dying lover's body, the sky above them opens up, at which point you either buy into the film's open-heart theatrics or head for the aisles. Though Strand's U.S. release takes its title from a textual reference to Breakfast at Tiffany's, the movie's original title character is Teresa Madruga's Odete, a spectacularly unstable store clerk who convinces herself that she's pregnant with Rui's dead lover's baby. When they're called on to do anything other than look naked and pretty, the film's actors often fall short — Madruga's fits of insane laughter come off like the chortling of a melodrama villain — but Rodrigues' frankly nutsoid vision ends with a kicker so perverse you have to love it a little. —S.A. (7/14, 5:00 PMT; 7/16, 7:00 PMT

Scarlet (co-writer Susan Priver) is a successful L.A. matchmaker who can't seem to find her own perfect match. One day, a beautiful Italian actress named Sabrina rear-ends Scarlet's car, sparking an unlikely friendship that develops into an even more unlikely romance. If only radically changing one's sexual orientation could be so easy. Laden with stock transformations (perky Sabrina teaches repressed Scarlet to loosen up and wear brighter colors) and populated with a host of quirky sitcom-esque characters (including Scarlet's overbearing mother and pot-smoking lawyer brother), Scarlet is shameless enough to end with the couple literally sailing off into the sunset. —T.M. (7/14, 7:30 WT; 7/15, 9:30 WT)

Whole New Thing

Homeschooled until the age of 13, Emerson (Aaron Webber) has already written a sprawling fantasy novel and (as he's fond of pointing out) is probably smarter than most of the teachers at the public school he's suddenly dropped into. But being raised in isolation by hippie parents doesn't exactly prepare a kid for the real world. Then again, no one in Amnon Buchbinder's low-key melodrama is too adept at facing facts. Populated by idealists whose lofty goals have taken some hits, Thing sees Emerson's social and sexual maturation forcing a crisis on his parents, who have retreated into narcissism or cynicism, and an English teacher whose self-enforced loneliness leaves him unable to deal with his student's crush in between anonymous encounters in a rest stop bathroom. — S.B. (7/19, 7:15 PMT; 7/23, 12:00 PMT)

Yaniv Dabach's documentary follows gay, New York-based rugby team The Gotham Knights, who are underdogs less because of their sexuality than their youth and inexperience. Their aim isn't to win, but to simply score a try — rugby's version of a goal. While the team isn't short on personalities, making it hard not to root for them, With You! lingers on unexciting footage and strives to manufacture drama where there is none. —M.E. (7/16, 3:00 PMT*)