Latest news with #Plainclothes
Metro
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
SXSW London: Five live performances, film showcases and talks you must see
The world's creative eyes are on London this week as the capital's first SXSW festival kicks off. Across six jam-packed days, the likes of Idris Elba, Sophie Turner and Katherine Ryan will grace stages across numerous venues in Shoreditch, east London. And it's not just talks. Established and rising musicians make up an eclectic roster of live performances. Talking to Metro, festival CEO Max Alexander described this year's event as a 'love letter to London'. There's so much to see and experience across the week. Thankfully, Metro, as SXSW London media partners, has teamed up with festival curators for their five must-see events across music, film and conference. Metro's assistant editor (news) Rory McKeown has also given his five music acts to see this year. NAO Sasha Keable Alice Glass DJ LO Down Loretta Brown AKA Erykah Badu Lila Ike Alice Glass Amahla Heartworms Keg L'Objectif Ticketing app DICE has put together a list of their 25 grassroots artists you need to see in London over the next six months. With tickets ranging from free to £27.50, these shows will ensure a great night to suit all tastes and budgets. Click HERE to catch the full list. Cosmic Archeology: The films of Jenn Nkiru Unbound (world premiere) Plainclothes (UK premiere) Silent Observers (UK premiere) Lesbian Space Princess (UK premiere) A Conversation on AI – Demis Hassabis, co-founder & CEO, Google DeepMind & Francine Laqua, Anchor and Editor-At-Large, Bloomberg Engineering the Impossible – Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO, Colossal Biosciences & Sophie Turner The Future of Entertainment – Björn Ulvaeus & Laura Barton, Guardian The Brand the Brand the Brand! – Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO, VaynerMedia & Selina Sykes, Unilever Transforming at Scale – Mark Read, WPP and Katie Prescott, Technology Business Editor, The Times SXSW London takes place from today (June 2) until Saturday (June 7) at venues across London. For more information and tickets, click here. MORE: Rochelle Humes has moved on from music – what she's doing now might surprise you MORE: Rock legend, 78, wheeled off stage in coffin during bizarre exit MORE: SXSW London: Everything you can expect from festival's inaugural week in the Capital
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
NewFest 2025: LGBTQ+ projects we're most excited to watch
Courtesy of NewFest Heightened Scrutiny; Plainclothes; Dreams in Nightmares NewFest Pride is one of very few film festivals with a primary focus on celebrating queer content. Thankfully, the 2025 edition of the festival won't be any different. The 37-year-old film festival, based in New York City, is presenting its annual Pride selection starting on Thursday, May 29. This year, the organization is presenting films that could become sizable box office successes, as well as indie darlings that have received acclaim at other festival circuits. These projects include the Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey-led Sundance Award-winning drama, Plainclothes, an advance screening of HBO Max's And Just Like That... season 3, as well as Jimpa featuring Academy Award winner Olivia Colman. Since 1988, NewFest has proudly hosted global theatrical releases of seminal queer films such as Paris Is Burning, Hedwig & the Angry Inch, God's Own Country, Bottoms, and Problemista, to name a few. Here's a list of LGBTQ+ films we're most excited to watch at NewFest Pride 2025. Courtesy of NewFest John Lithgow and Aud Mason-Hyde in Jimpa. Olivia Colman and John Lithgow star in the festival's opening night film. Colman plays a filmmaker named Hannah, who takes her trans nonbinary teenage child (Aud Mason-Hyde) to visit their gay grandfather, affectionately nicknamed "Jimpa," played by Lithgow. Her child decides they want to stay with Jimpa for a year abroad, Hannah has to learn to let go and confront her past, as well as her idea of parenting. The film also premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to positive reviews. More information about this screening of can be found on . Courtesy of NewFest Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey in Plainclothes. Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey star in Plainclothes, a steamy drama about cruising in the 1990s inspired by real events. In the movie, Blyth plays an undercover police officer who lures gay men to fall into his trap and quite literally catches them with their pants down. Meanwhile, Tovey portrays a seductive queer cruiser who catches Blyth off-guard and makes him question his duties as a cop in contrast to his attraction to Tovey's character. Out reviewed the film at this year's Sundance, where it won the Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast. More information about this screening of can be found on . Courtesy of NewFest Dezi Bing, Denée Benton, and Sasha Compère in Dreams in Nightmares. Starring Dezi Bing, Denée Benton, and Sasha Compère, Dreams in Nightmares has been making the rounds at film festivals, which included a world premiere at the 2024 BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia and a screening at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year. Through NewFest, New York City audiences will now get the chance to see Shatara Michelle Ford's sophomore feature that follows three Black queer friends embarking on a road trip to find their missing friend. More information about this screening of can be found on . Courtesy of NewFest Elliot Page and Chase Strangio in Heightened Scrutiny. With the relentless assault on transgender rights in the U.S. in the last few years, this documentary is particularly timely. Heightened Scrutiny follows Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney who became the first trans person to argue in front of the United States Supreme Court. In this case, Strangio works to overturn Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The film features commentary and expertise from activists like Laverne Cox and Elliot Page, as well as journalists like Lydia Polgreen and Gina Chua. More information about this screening of can be found on . Courtesy of NewFest Alan Cumming and Charlie Creed-Miles in Drive Back Home. Legendary actor Alan Cumming, who's now also a reality TV superstar as the host of The Traitors, stars in Drive Back Home. The film centers on a man (Charlie Creed-Miles) from a small town in New Jersey — set in the 1970s — who is tasked with bailing his brother (Cumming) out of jail after being caught having sex with a man in a park. The brothers then set out on a road trip that tests their bond as they make their way back home. More information about this screening of can be found on .
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Plainclothes' Review: A Closeted Cop Is Tempted by the Gay Men He's Tailing in Steamy '90s-Set Psychodrama
These days, gay men can arrange sex by a smartphone app as easily as ordering a pizza. But back in the '90s, when 'Plainclothes' takes place, such trysts not only had to be coordinated in person, but could be punished by arrest. Audiences of a certain age and demographic almost certainly remember the risk and fear (not to mention the illicit excitement) back then, when undercover police monitored public 'tearooms' for lewd behavior. In writer-director Carmen Emmi's 'we've come a long way, baby' debut, the cops take it one step further, luring homosexuals into exposing themselves. But what if the officer in question was closeted and one of these strangers slipped him his phone number? That's the intriguing — if credulity-stretching — premise of 'Plainclothes,' which casts Tom Blyth (the outlaw star of Epix's 'Billy the Kid') as Lucas, a second-generation cop with all kinds of identity issues. He seems relatively comfortable with the assignment early on, hanging out at the shopping mall, where his job is to catch the eye of an interested stranger, follow him to the bathroom and then bust the 'pervert' once he does something illegal (which, in this case, is simply flashing his wares). More from Variety 'Rebuilding' Review: Josh O'Connor Is a Rancher Who's Lost Everything in a Drama That Mostly Just Sits There 'Atropia' Review: Alia Shawkat Trains Troops Assigned to a Fake Iraqi Town in a Self-Reflexive War Comedy That Peters Out 'The Legend of Ochi' Review: Practical Magic Breathes Life Into A24's Grounded Fantasy Preaching Man's Coexistence With Nature The police officers can't speak during the process, lest the entire operation be considered entrapment. That suits Lucas fine … until he meets Andrew ('Looking' heartthrob Russell Tovey), who beckons Lucas to the last stall. Suddenly, Lucas is overwhelmed with feelings, which Emmi suggests by splicing VHS footage into the scene — a sophisticated if somewhat distracting technique for putting audiences in Lucas' fragmented headspace. Instead of arresting Andrew, Lucas lets him go, taking the stranger's number and calling him to arrange a more conventional date. It's around this time that Lucas starts to develop a conscience about arresting men for desires he shares — though he's desperate to hide that dimension of himself from his mother (Maria Dizzia). Emmi was but a boy in 1997, the year when 'Plainclothes' is set, which makes the degree to which he successfully re-creates the atmosphere — as well as the uncertainty and paranoia — of that time rather remarkable. Gay cruising depends largely on unspoken cues: a lingering glance, an interested look back, the conspicuous adjustment of one's 'basket.' Here, such behavior is not as sexy as Drew Lint's 'M/M' or as amusing as Tsai Ming-liang's art-house 'Goodbye Dragon Inn,' and yet, it's encouraging to see these codes re-created by a young filmmaker, who uses mirrors placed directly above a bank of urinals to let the characters' eyes do the talking. For Lucas, whose understanding ex-girlfriend (Amy Forsyth) is the only person he's told of his bi-curious inclinations, the conflicted young man finally seems ready to explore his attraction to men — and he wants Andrew to be his first. 'Plainclothes' presents this experimental impulse in a semi-romantic light, even though neither man can 'host.' Lucas, who gives Andrew a fake name, worries what the neighbors will think, while his crush claims to be a husband and father with a high-profile job as some kind of 'administrator.' That means finding somewhere public to rendez-vous and eventually hook up — which of course exposes Lucas to the same laws he's tasked with enforcing. Lucas' commanding officer (John Bedford Lloyd) explains that someone who'd had oral sex in such a spot went on to molest some little girls. Now concerned citizens are demanding a crackdown, which seems like a stretch. Police have needed less reason than that to target homosexual activity, and as a training film shows, they've gone so far as to hide cameras behind one-way mirrors in order to discourage such behavior. After striking out at a repertory movie palace, Andrew suggests a local park, which introduces another dimension of '90s-era cruising Emmi must have read up on (for context, George Michael was arrested by an undercover vice cop in a Los Angeles toilet, and later outed by a British tabloid after paparazzi caught him cruising London's Hampstead Heath). The 'Plainclothes' pair have better luck, getting it on in a public greenhouse before Andrew's beeper goes off. To the uninitiated, when it comes to trysts between closeted men, there are all kinds of rules, both unwritten and explicit. Andrew warns Lucas that he rarely sees anyone more than once, but Lucas ignores his boundaries. The hot-blooded cop is hooked, running Andrew's license plate through the police database and proceeding to stalk him at work — a bad idea on his part, but a satisfying one, dramatically speaking, since doing so inadvertently exposes the man Lucas had started to believe was his soulmate. You can't entirely blame Lucas for wanting a relationship, though toilets aren't typically the place to find one. Surely even small-town Mansfield, Mass., has a gay bar — or else, a short drive to Boston might do the trick — but Lucas' only exposure to gay culture is the bathroom he's been surveilling. (It may be hard for younger audiences to imagine, but before Ellen DeGeneres came out in 1997, the media was relatively skittish about anything queer, depriving Lucas and his peers of role models or basic information.) As impressive as Emmi's ultra-subjective multimedia approach can be at times, the mix of formats and different timelines occasionally feels like a strategy to mislead. The film has a few major plot holes, mostly concerning the present-tense family meal where Lucas seems to be having a nervous breakdown. He can hardly contain his secret any longer, but when his uncle's new girlfriend (Alessandra Ford Balazs) threatens to expose him, Lucas flips out, and Erik Vogt-Nilsen's editing gets downright tortured. 'Plainclothes' builds to an intense and ultimately cathartic climax, but there's something retrograde about the shame Lucas feels. Emmi wants us to experience his protagonist's sense of suffocation, when looking back from the presence, we just want to shout: 'It gets better!' Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tom Blyth on Playing a Closeted Gay Cop in ‘Plainclothes' and His ‘Intimate, Really Vivid' Sex Scenes With Russell Tovey
Tom Blyth may have starred in Francis Lawrence's box office hit 'The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,' but that doesn't mean the British actor is moving on from independent film. Case in point: 'Plainclothes.' In writer-director Carmen Emmi's feature debut, Blyth stars as Lucas, an undercover cop in 1990s Syracuse, N.Y., who falls in love with Andrew (Russell Tovey), one of his targets in a sting operation going after gay men for public indecency in a mall bathroom. More from Variety 'Train Dreams' Review: A Landmark Homage to the Unsung Workers of the American West Plays Out Across Forests and Joel Edgerton's Face 'Lurker' Review: A Geek Edges Himself Into a Pop Star's Inner Circle in Alex Russell's Nifty and Unnerving Parable of the Pathology of Fame 'Coexistence, My Ass!' Review: Urgent and Brilliant Documentary Finds Radical Ideas Following Israeli Stand-Up Comic's Peacekeeping Efforts 'There is just something really refreshing about the scrappiness of a smaller film like ['Plainclothes'],' Blyth tells me during a Zoom video interview for this week's 'Just for Variety' podcast from Senegal, where he is shooting Claire Denis' 'The Cry of the Guards.' 'I've done a bunch of them this year and last year. I've gone back to that kind of on purpose. It reminds you why you got into this in the first place. It reminds you of being a 15-year-old kid with my neighbor with a camcorder making those zombie films in my backyard.' 'Plainclothes' premieres at Sundance on Jan. 26. Not that Blyth would mind returning for the upcoming 'The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes' sequel. 'Rachel [Zegler]and I are not going to be in this one because the next one takes place 45 years after ours did. It makes me sad because I miss everyone involved.' he says, adding, 'I did text Francis the other day, and he said, 'I miss you.' And I said, 'Well, prosthetics are really great these days. It wouldn't be that hard to make me look 65.'' This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full conversation on the 'Just for Variety' podcast. Blyth also joined the Variety Studio presented by Audible at Sundance to discuss 'Plainclothes,' the full vide of which can be watched above. How did the 'Plainclothes' script come to you? I was filming Season 2 of my TV show, 'Billy the Kid,' in Calgary, Canada. I'd been reading a lot of scripts at that time, and this one was the first and only one where I sat up in my seat and went, 'Holy shit, I have to do this.' Carmen flew himself up to Calgary in the middle of a snowstorm to walk through the script. We went out for dinner and drinks, and it was such a good creative match from the get-go that we were like, 'Let's do this together.' What did you know about these the sting operations? I knew about it happening up until the '50s, but I think I wrongly and naively assumed that it died out. One of the first things Carmen did was send me the article that inspired the story from the early 2000s. I remember being really shocked by how recent it was. Did you do a chemistry read with Russell? Carmen and I were doing work on the script and work on the character of Lucas and building it together and we were brainstorming about who could possibly play Andrew. I texted Carmen, 'Fuck, what about Russell Tovey?' Carmen texted back saying, 'He's on my dream list. We might try and offer it to him.' And sure enough, they did and he responded. We did a chemistry test on Zoom, but I think Carmen already knew he'd be great for the part. It was more of a formality than anything. How much did you make use of an for your sex scenes with Russell? We had an amazing intimacy coordinator, Joey Massa. I've worked with a lot of intimacy coordinators and they're always amazing. Sometimes I feel they're called in when the scene isn't even that intimate just because everyone these days is rightfully trying to correct the course and make sure that everyone's protected. Sometimes you'll have a kissing scene and you go, 'We probably know how to do this.' But this was genuinely intimate stuff. It was really intimate, really vivid, and Joey was incredible. It felt very organic. It felt like we rehearsed it in a way where I think Russell and I both were made to feel confident and comfortable enough that we could lead it. I think it works best when the actors feel emboldened to be able to take control of the choreography and make it feel organic. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Anora,' 'Nosferatu,' 'Nickel Boys' and More Could Use DGA, PGA and WGA Noms for Big Boosts in Oscar Race SAG Awards Final Predictions: 'Conclave,' 'Emilia Pérez' and 'Wicked' Projected to Lead Nominations
