Notizie

Up next from indie filmmaker Todd Verow (Frisk) is a thriller titled You Can’t Stay Here, which will first be exclusively opening in New York City on January 5, 2024.

The exclusive engagement at the IFC Center in NYC will feature live Q&As from director Todd Verow and star Guillermo Diaz.

The movie takes place in NYC in the mid-90s at the height of the AIDS epidemic and follows photographer Rick (Diaz), who spends his nights cruising in Central Park.

After Rick witnesses the murder of a gay man in the park, he throws himself into a game of cat and mouse with the black leather-clad murderer.

“While set in the 1990s, the film’s themes of homophobia, social hysteria, and finding oneself in a dangerous and intolerant world are as resonant as ever today,” Verow recently said.

Check out the poster and some exclusive stills below, along with the official trailer.

What critic B. Ruby Rich dubbed the “New Queer Cinema” encountered little but praise (plus some attention-getting damnation from political conservatives) with such early ’90s titles as “Swoon,” “My Own Private Idaho,” “The Living End,” “Paris Is Burning,” and so forth. But by mid-decade the vogue had run long enough that even gay audiences felt less inclined to embrace every creative effort, giving a relatively cold shoulder to Steve McLean’s “Postcards From America” (1994) and Todd Verow’s “Frisk.” Both were adapted from edgy gay lit figures — the former from autobiographical writings by David Wojnarowicz (who’d died of AIDS), the latter from a typically violent, queasy novel by Dennis Cooper.

These films look better now than most critics or viewers allowed then. The revulsion “Frisk” was greeted with (at a time when gay films were expected to provide some measure of reassuring uplift) only emboldened Verow as a since-highly-prolific director of microbudget features,...

It's a writing cliche, but it's sadly often very true: an author's debut novel is often much better than his or her follow-up. There are lots of reasons for this: the author spends years honing and revising that first novel, which is often based on the most dramatic and engaging idea the writer has ever had.

Meanwhile, the second novel, which is usually written "on contract," is often rushed to capitalize on the success of the debut — and, let's face it, a lot of writers don't work well under pressure, or have a second truly interesting story to tell.

I'm happy to report that one author has dramatically upended this writing cliche. I liked Selfish and Perverse, the first novel of comedian Bob Smith, who was the first out comedian to appear on The Tonight Snow (back in the 1980s), and who has also written nonfiction in the past, including the Lambda Award-winning Openly Bob.