Zachary Quinto comes out… meanwhile, Weekend explores the "gay predicament of love in a straight culture."

Today Zachary Quinto confirms NYMagazine that he’s gay and uses the news to take a stand, turning the public confirmation into a personal affirmation on his blog:

when i found out that jamey rodemeyer killed himself – i felt deeply troubled. but when i found out that jamey rodemeyer had made an it gets better video only months before taking his own life – i felt indescribable despair… in light of jamey’s death – it became clear to me in an instant that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it – is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality… we are at the precipice of great transformation within our culture and government. i believe in the power of intention to change the landscape of our society – and it is my intention to live an authentic life of compassion and integrity and action. jamey rodemeyer’s life changed mine. and while his death only makes me wish that i had done this sooner – i am eternally grateful to him for being the catalyst for change within me. [abbreviated]

Since we don’t usually cover filmmakers’ off-screen lives unless the story is relevant to movies, I’ll take this opportunity to tie this news to the trailer for Weekend — it’s not a film starring Quinto, but one I feel he’d admire.

The Boston Globe says Weekend is “One of the truest, most beautiful movies ever made about two strangers.” It’s standing with a score of 81 on Metacritic. (More review quotes after the cut.) Out Cinema like this may be outside our usual awards-centric focus, but I’d be negligent in my responsibilities if this movie went unmentioned much longer.

Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum

Boy meets boy in this low-budget, acutely observed relationship drama, a breakout hit at this year’s SXSW film festival. In the course of a weekend of sex, drugs, and a lot of talk, an intimate relationship between a recessive, semicloseted lifeguard (Tom Cullen) and a restless, loudly out artist (Chris New, magnetically slippery) emerges, creating an unexpected bond as deep as it is fleeting. British filmmaker Andrew Haigh’s background in editing (from Gladiator to Mister Lonely) is evident in the casual beauty of moments that only appear ”found,” giving Weekend an engrossing documentary feel.

Boston Globe, Wesley Morris

There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, “What is going on?’’ You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.

Sometimes you don’t want to escape. You want to connect with a movie that’s really about something, to listen to a filmmaker talk things out, to watch him amp everyday life without calling attention to his turning up the sound.

You want to see a guy contemplate getting dressed; open a box of Nikes, then put it away; maybe get stoned; head to a friend’s dinner party, then go out to a Nottingham club where he’ll meet another guy, take him home, and spend the next day and a half getting to know him so well that, come Sunday, he’s in love. You want to see intimacy and sex, yes. But you want to experience the way intimacy compounds sex until it begins to sprout feelings. What you want is “Weekend,’’ one of the truest, most beautiful movies ever made about two strangers…

People have said that part of the reason “Weekend’’ works is that it’s not about a gay relationship, per se, but just about relationships. Yes, but mostly no. Men and women talk, as they have since the dawn of the movies, about the particulars of being men and women. But at a bar we overhear Glen tell someone that the culture has been set up to make heterosexuality the dominant norm, which more or less means that the only way to understand other relationships is by determining who’s the man, who’s the woman, or who’s Seth Rogen.

Haigh has seen (and edited) a lot of films, and this one, consciously and amazingly, borrows from romance plots right down to the beat-the-clock finale. “Weekend’’ dramatizes a conversation the movies never have: two homosexual men debating each other over what kind of gay to be, working out their emotional damage politically. Is marriage a human right or a compromise? Is Russell’s decorum actually just a form of shame? Is Glen’s lasciviousness?

This is a story specifically about the gay predicament of love in a straight culture. It’s about the harmonization of Glen’s radicalism (he’s the kid who comes out on Mother’s Day) and Russell’s neutrality, how exposure to one changes the other. It’s possible to leave this movie astounded that two men can have these conversations and still want to hold each other. But Russell and Glen’s emotional nudity is their balm and bond. The excitement is that you sense a director trying a rare expansion of the conversation the movies can have about love and sex and life. We have to talk about last night in order to figure out how we’d like to spend tomorrow.

The New York Times, A.O. Scott

The collapse of sexual taboos has caused some trouble for love, or at least for love stories. That sex often precedes emotional intimacy — or proceeds without it — is a fact of life that movies, with their deep and longstanding investment in romance, especially have a hard time dealing with. Contemporary sexual mores tend to be explored either with grim, punitive realism (as in Steve McQueen’s “Shame”) or with cute and careful wishful thinking…

You can’t really fault Hollywood, an empire built on fantasies of heterosexual happiness, for simplifying such complex matters. But there is also a need for stories that address the complex entanglements of love and sex honestly, without sentiment or cynicism and with the appropriate mixture of humor, sympathy and erotic heat.

“Weekend,” Andrew Haigh’s astonishingly self-assured, unassumingly profound second feature, is just such a film. In its matter-of-fact, tightly focused observation of two young men who find their one-night stand growing into something more serious, the movie ranges over vast, often neglected regions of 21st-century life. It is about the paradoxes and puzzlements of gay identity in a post-identity-politics era, and also about the enduring mystery of sexual attraction and its consequences.