Big Boys: a story of 'self-acceptance'

Loosely inspired by his own childhood experiences, writer/director Corey Sherman's low-budget debut feature "explores a boy's cautious first steps towards sexual awakening with gentle humour and empathy", said Wendy Ide in The Observer.

Isaac Krasner stars as Jamie, a chubby, dorky 14-year-old who is outraged to discover that his beloved cousin Allie (Dora Madison Burge) has invited her new boyfriend Dan (David Johnson III) to join them on their long-planned family camping trip to California's San Bernardino Mountains. But when the teenager actually meets Dan – a big, brawny dude who wears his baseball cap backwards – he is "immediately smitten, spewing his breathless admiration in an unfiltered rush of chatter and brooding in his tent at night as he fantasises about gruff and manly bonding moments".

The film is "in the same sun-kissed terrain" as "Call Me by Your Name" and "My Summer of Love", said Kevin Maher in The Times. But whereas those pictures celebrated "the liberating possibilities of gay romance", this one dwells on the "heroic levels of self-acceptance that the soft and achingly sensitive Jamie has to access in order to fit into his family's straight and unavoidably macho world".

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The performances are uniformly strong (Krasner's in particular is "remarkable"), and the script is brilliantly economical. The "coming-of-age" genre is an overcrowded one, said Peter Debruge in Variety; and some of the scenes here feel rather familiar. Nevertheless, aided by an "endearing" cast, Sherman manages on limited means to make his film memorable.