Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
At a birthday party in 1968 New York, a surprise guest and a drunken game leave seven gay friends reckoning with unspoken feelings and buried truths.
Ryan Murphy's Netflix remake of Mart Crowley's landmark play benefits enormously from an all-gay, all-star cast (Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells) delivering uniformly strong performances that give the material real emotional weight. The stage-derived plot remains compelling and claustrophobic, with its cruel party-game structure still landing punches after decades. However, as a remake of a 1970 film of an already-famous play, the novelty is quite low — it largely functions as a prestige preservation rather than a reinvention, and the direction never transcends its theatrical origins in visually interesting ways. The cinematography is serviceable but flat, staying close to the stage blocking without finding a distinctive cinematic language. The ending retains the original's bittersweet, emotionally exhausted quality, which works reasonably well.