Variety - The Best Films of 2022
Number 4 - BROS
“If the first gay romantic comedy from a major studio had merely been a gay gloss on a Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan rom-com of the ’90s (“Sleepless in Provincetown”? “You’ve Got Male”?), it’s unclear whether even
thatwould have ignited the box office. But guess what? The movie is so much funnier, sharper, richer, bolder and more audaciously observant than that. Billy Eichner, who co-wrote the film, infuses “Bros” with his literate acid wit, and he plays the most entertaining brainiac romantic dyspeptic since the heyday of Woody Allen. Entwined in the tale of Bobby (Eichner), a New York podcast host, and Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), an estate lawyer too sexy for his job, is a full-on comic vision of gay romantic life in the 21st century. The characters may be looking for love, but they keep getting tripped up by the hookup culture they’ve created as a kind of playground — a culture the film both celebrates and scaldingly satirizes. Eichner and his co-writer and director, Nicholas Stoller, root “Bros” in Hollywood tropes, but the movie’s secret weapon is its unconventional ideology: its embrace of the idea that gay culture and straight culture have
very different ways to court and spark.”
This fall, the story of how prestige films, awards films — whatever you want to call them — underperformed at movie theaters was more than a box office story. It was, potentially, the story of a pa…
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