Here is a sampling of movies playing during the first weekend of the Pittsburgh International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival:

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

"I Can't Think Straight" is a classic tale of star-crossed lovers with a slight Bollywood flavor and a gender twist.

Tala (Lisa Ray) -- an upper-class Jordanian businesswoman who has been engaged four times but never married (much to her parents' chagrin) -- is preparing for her wedding. Then, she meets Leyla (Sheetal Sheth), a British woman who works in an insurance company, but longs to be a writer.

Leyla is dating Tala's male best friend, Ali (Rez Kempton). The two women hit it off almost immediately. They enjoy each other's company and challenge each other's intellects until their friendship moves beyond platonic to romantic and their clandestine affair creates problems for them both. In the end, Tala and Leyla make hard decisions about how they will live their lives and whether they will live them together.

Raven-haired beauties Ray and Sheth, who Shamim Sarif also directed in 2007's "The World Unseen," are a delight in this nicely paced film shot on location in London and Paris.

The film won the Best Fiction Feature Audience Award at the 2009 Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

-- L.A. Johnson, Post-Gazette deputy magazine editor

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

After a Cleveland doctor removes the two chest drains, the patient quips, "I'm a new man." In a way, fAe isn't kidding because Fae the woman is transitioning to fAe the man and the breasts are now gone.

Director John Bergmann charts the process for the friend and Western Pennsylvania native who stays on his parents' farm while recuperating from a double mastectomy that's part of the process.

As a Cleveland physician explains, "There's no one who gets sex-reassignment surgery and you wake up and you're a different sex. This is a long, involved process."

"Gender Redesigner" is a sympathetic, candid portrait that keeps its focus on a single person. It has no stats or gender breakdowns, and only the most cursory information about other costly, not always successful surgical enhancements.

There are some obvious holes because fAe couldn't risk cameras at work and his parents didn't want to participate. They did welcome their child to their rural farmhouse and even enlarged it when another son (who is interviewed on camera) returned home, too.

"Gender Redesigner" satisfies the curious but more importantly, introduces moviegoers to a person who is finally comfortable in his own skin and identity.

-- Barbara Vancheri, PG movie editor

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

This drama about a gay 15-year-old New Yorker who moves to the South after his mother unexpectedly dies is as much about race and family as sexual orientation.

Getting his first look at the North Carolina town he will call home, Sequan Green (Derrick L. Middleton) says, "It's nice here." But then a relative drives deeper into neighborhoods where the bridges are one-lane, the roads pitted and the houses more likely to be glorified trailers.

Sequan, a studious boy rarely without a James Baldwin book, finds himself among pampered star athletes, drug users and sellers, a girl who becomes an unlikely friend and adults with secrets or struggles of their own. Chief among them is the African-American sheriff (co-writer Darien Sills-Evans) who finds keeping the peace at odds with maintaining the law.

A couple of elements are contrived or coincidental and the ending is shocking but melodramatic. "Rivers," however, stays afloat thanks to its strong young cast, with Middleton impressive as a boy who makes no pretense about who he is, even if he pays a high price for it.

-- Vancheri

2 1/2 stars = Average
Ratings explained

"Hannah Free" is the story of a decades-old romance between two women, Hannah and Rachel, now in the same nursing home but unable to see each other because they're not "family."

Their lifetime courtship -- disrupted by marriage, war, wanderlust and infidelity -- is told through flashbacks to their childhood, young adulthood and old age.

Older Hannah (Sharon Gless of "Queer as Folk," "Burn Notice" and "Cagney and Lacey" fame) recounts their tender and tortured romance from her nursing home bed through imagined conversations with a younger Rachel (Ann Hagemann) and real interviews with a young visitor, Greta (Jacqui Jackson), who is interested in her recollection of the Depression.

Hannah is frustrated because Rachel's daughter, Marge, (Taylor Miller) won't let her visit older Rachel (Maureen Gallagher), now on life support. Then, the inquisitive visitor offers to help.

Gless and Hagemann give strong performances in this poignant tale -- despite its Hallmark Channel/Lifetime movie patina -- that has a pleasing although predictable ending.

-- Johnson

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