WHEN AMERICAN Film-makers include gay characters in their films, they tend to focus on them as problematic-the problems of coming out; the heady, tragic problems of finding a boyfriend; family problems; and on and on. For films that incorporate well-rounded gay characters but aren’t about the supposed problems posed by gayness, it’s usually necessary to look to the U.K. or the Continent. Nicholas Hytner’s The History Boys, the film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Olivier- and Tony-Award winning play, is the latest of these…

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL has discovered a secret and he wants to share it with you. It is this: sex is good for what ails you. Whatever your problem-loneliness, a failed marriage, crippling shyness coupled with voyeurism, repressed lesbianism, suicidal depression-all you have to do is go to a sex club, have a few heart-to-heart conversations, watch some drag performers, and get laid; and then life will be rosy.

FOLLOWING OUR FLING with the faraway world of gay cowboys, Boy Culture returns us to the more familiar turf of contemporary urban gay lives-and thus to a movie that’s likely to have none of the “crossover” appeal of Brokeback Mountain. But it’s a fine and fascinating movie that explores the complexities of gay life using a suitably complicated storytelling technique.

In Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s masterful portrayal of author Truman Capote vividly conveys the weight of those burdens as part of director Bennett Miller’s cautionary tale of the pleasures and dangers of storytelling.

Although Brokeback is too painful a movie to watch many times, the curious thing is it makes you want to fall in love again. Instead, one listens to the soundtrack, which alternates between the pastoral beauty of Gustavo Santaolalla’s theme on the guitar-so spare, so haunting-and the raucous, messy world of the bars, where Matthew Shepard met his killers. I’m not sure why Brokeback is so moving. But in the end I think it has something to do with its being what McMurtry called it: “a tragedy of emotional deprivation.” This is surely a universal experience, but at a certain point in life most gay men seem to conclude that it’s the particular fate of being gay.

NEAR THE END of Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho, Scott Favor, played by a young Keanu Reeves, looks out from a limousine window to see his friend Mike Waters, played by River Phoenix, asleep on a sidewalk. The scene represents a significant plot shift in the film: …