[The “Murder House”] figures as prominently as any character in American Horror Story, the new hit show from out TV mogul Ryan Murphy, [and] When American Horror Story returns for a much anticipated second season, Murphy will present an entirely new cast in a new location.

THERE’S NOTHING really wrong with J. Edgar, a film directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Dustin Lance Black (who wrote the screenplay for Milk, another recent gay biopic). It’s atmospheric, it’s well acted, it covers an interesting sweep of American history, and it effectively dramatizes the relationship Hoover had with his lifelong companion Clyde Tolson-and, more important, the one he had with his mother. …

THE YOUNG FRENCH writer/director Céline Sciamma makes films that are empathetic and honest about the confusion that attends children’s sexual awakenings. Her first feature, 2007’s Water Lilies, dealt tenderly with the terrors and indignities of adolescent sexuality among a group of fifteen-year-old girls. Her latest film, Tomboy, explores an earlier and even more bewildering stage of life.

THERE’S A SCENE at around twenty minutes into the movie Weekend when the protagonist, a British lifeguard named Russell, stands at the edge of a swimming pool, just below a sign reading ‘Deep End’ that foreshadows where he’s headed. At that point in the film, Russell has gone to a gay bar and picked up a man named Glen, who defies the usual expectation of fleeing the scene the next morning and instead curls up beside Russell with a tape recorder, demanding that he relive the pickup from beginning to end.

As proof of the show’s growing popularity, five million viewers caught the Season Two finale, while more than twice that number tuned in for weekly installments of Season Three. The show’s political subtext has even attracted scholarly attention: the collection True Blood and Philosophy (2010) includes such chapter titles as “Coming Out of the Coffin and Coming Out of the Closet” and “Sookie, Sigmund, and the Edible Complex.”

THE OPENING PORTION of We Were Here, David Weissman and Bill Weber’s new documentary about the early years of AIDS in San Francisco, is one of surprising humor, even celebration. Using on-screen recollections of the film’s interview subjects interspersed with archival photography and snippets of the era’s popular music, the film reminds us of the creative energy and sexual exuberance that thrived in San Francisco, particularly in the Castro neighborhood, in the mid-to-late 1970’s. And this upbeat opening is reprised in the film’s wonderfully affirmative conclusion. Between these end points, however, is a sad and sobering look at the ruthlessness with which AIDS ravaged the city’s gay community.

THE GREAT FILMMAKER Jean-Luc Godard said somewhere that art is not a reflection of reality; it is the reality of that reflection. That being the case, to judge by the feature films coming out of the Sundance Film Festival this past January, it seems that GLBT youths are finding cinema to be the outlet with which to express the oppression of living in the closet and the freedom of coming out, both as individuals and as artists.

IN THE END, what is most poignant about Undertow, a new film by Javier Fuentes Leon, is the plight of the ghost. In the small fishing village in Peru where this remarkable film takes place, the boyfriends are able to walk down the street holding hands only after one of them has died-and is therefore invisible to everyone but his lover.