Known to fans of American Horror Story Freak Show as Paul the Illustrated Seal, Mat Fraser is on the crest of a career of unusual variety and distinction – and still describes himself as a “performing crip”.
Five events to catch at Fringe! 2014
Since first popping up to supplement the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival’s shorter-than-usual 2011 edition, the Fringe! Queer Art & Film Fest has comfortably established itself as a major event in its own right, bringing an eclectic, leftfield flavour to the capital’s queer screen culture that goes way beyond showcasing new features and shorts to include DIY […]
Articles about the RVT for QX and NPH for the Guardian
Just a quick update on a couple of pieces that ran this week. QX Magazine picked up my post from last weekend about the future of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and ran it as a spread in their latest edition. Happily, we were able to update it to include the news, which broke a couple of […]
Guardian articles on Neil Patrick Harris and The Imitation Game
Sorry for being quiet on here lately – been a busy boy lately with my PhD starting, trips to Sitges with Duckie and Lisbon for Queer Lisboa film festival, and various other things going on. But here are details on a couple of recent pieces for the Guardian. The first was an interview with Neil […]
Neil Patrick Harris loves him some immersive theatre
Neil Patrick Harris is a very interesting figure: a child star turned adult award-winner whose openness about being gay hasn’t hurt his mainstream success; in fact, he just played that ultimate outsider Hedwig on Broadway and Joe and Joan Six-Pack seem to love him all the more for it. In addition to his well-established love of musical theatre – which […]
Pride review for Sight & Sound
This review of Pride, released today in the UK, appears in the October 2014 issue of Sight & Sound. I recently argued in the Guardian that LGBT cinema is currently undergoing something of a ‘backward turn’: an increasingly sizeable body of work has emerged over recent years comprising films that could be considered retrospective in […]
10 LGBT-interest titles at 2014’s London Film Festival
The BFI renewed its commitment to LGBT and queer film in March with the rebranding of the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival as BFI Flare. But LGBT film fans won’t have to wait for Flare 2015 for another sizeable crop of cinematic fun under the BFI banner: next month’s London Film Festival is positively bulging […]
Marty McFly lives! But is he saviour or zombie?
At the end of Back to the Future, our hero crashes his time-travelling car into a building. It used to be a cinema but now it’s a church. That seems right. In a way, certain kinds of movie, including Back to the Future, are morphing into religions, offering us opportunities to be together and happy – though […]
We’re revolting! The wonder of Divine
Today, July 18 2014, sees the UK release of I Am Divine, a documentary by Jeffrey Schwarz about the mother of all alt-drag icons. This is a piece I wrote about Divine for the Curzon cinemas magazine. No one likes to be constantly identified with past glories and by the end of his life, […]
Critic pride! Reclaiming the ‘c’-word in my new ebook on criticism
I used to be wary of describing myself as a critic. It just sounds mean, or like you know better than everyone else. But I’ve thought about it and these days, it’s a term I embrace: critic and proud! The reason for this is pretty much the same straightforward reason a lot of us still […]
