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Reviews Counted:16
Fresh:13
Rotten:3
Average Rating:7.1/10
Runtime: 75 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
US Box Office: $0
Synopsis: Maybe it took somebody with no investment in the sexual-culture wars of the 1980s, like 24-year-old filmmaker Daryl Wein, to rediscover a lightning-rod figure like safe-sex pioneer Richard... [More]
Wein tackles an incredibly complex array of issues surrounding HIV, focusing largely on Berkowitz, once a nice young Jewish kid at Rutgers who found a lucrative career as an S&M hustler before becoming an activist and co-author.
A thoroughly fascinating, illuminating and vital documentary for everyone young and old.
Daryl Wein calls attention both to unjustly neglected pioneering AIDS activist Richard Berkowitz and his still widely ignored groundbreaking promotion of safe sex.
Top CriticWein clearly cares for his subject. Yet he leaves room for our admiration and our ambivalence. This is an achievement of heart and of mind.
Scruffy but arresting documentary about an ever-embattled, pioneering fighter in the gay AIDS wars.
For gays who remember the nightmare, Sex Positive may be too depressing to watch. But the movie strikes a cautionary tone for a younger generation that, it says, isn't taking the HIV threat seriously.
The movie jolts you with the realization that the AIDS epidemic and the public debate about such issues have retreated so far under the news radar as to be half-forgotten.
Top CriticThough he made an impact on thousands of lives -- or so, this intermittently compelling biography suggests -- AIDS activist Richard Berkowitz remains unknown and uncelebrated, alone and barely scraping by.
The film is founded on shaky, near-exploitative ground, something mirrored in the agitated handheld camerawork by Alex Bergman and in Berkowitz’s offhand comment about the good this film could do in encouraging safe sex.
It helps that Wein's subject is such a fascinating, garrulous paradox.
Sex Positive uses the dual activist/sexual outlaw persona of "safer sex" pioneer Richard Berkowitz as a prism through which to view the life-and-death struggles of an era.
Sex Positive too often looks like something hastily thrown together, which belies the built trust evident between the filmmaker and his subject. Over the course of the film, Berkowitz moves from refusing to discuss certain specifics to spilling in great d
Filmmaker Daryl Wein throws us into the epicentre of this period, when three men matter-of-factly said the unthinkable
Definitely worth seeing...many of us literally owe our lives to (the film's subjects).
A well-documented look back at this history and these people that most audiences will see when it once it reaches PBS...which it will.
Daryl Wein's engrossing portrait of Richard Berkowitz is freshly engaging largely due to the subject himself.
Top Critic
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