FILM / True confessions: Ryan Gilbey previews the Eighth London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; plus free ticket offer

That movie sucked,' snaps a dyke in Rose Troche's frothy comedy Go Fish. 'Queers are so pathetic (in it).' It's a riposte that chimes out in cinema foyers and taxis home, and it's still echoing: gay cinema has more criteria to meet than any other genre and gay film- makers must look outward. The Eighth London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, which opened at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank last Saturday with Troche's film and ends on 31 March, suggests that it is doing just that.

Sandra Bernhard, the subject of Arena's Confession of a Pretty Lady (26 / 31 Mar), is an abrasive symbol of femininity. She's a blazing star: when she intimidates Bob Monkhouse in an excerpt from his 1986 show, this becomes suddenly irrefutable. There are electrifying, visceral scenes from her live show, too, which should ensure that she can never again be dismissed as just 'Madonna's friend'.

She's a regular on Roseanne, the first sitcom to integrate gay characters. Roseanne has the right idea. Nobody wants tokenism or apology. That's why it's such a breeze watching Edgar Michael Bravo's I'll Love You Forever . . . Tonight (25 / 29 Mar), about a clutch of gay friends holidaying. Bravo's film lags but he has a keen ear for stilted small-talk, and at least shoots sex like he enjoys it. There's no shame there, or in Grief (31 Mar).

Grief is a trashy comedy about the writers on a camp daytime soap, and though the characters are woefully underwritten, and there's scant momentum, it's often a gas, peppered with Thundercrack-style gags.

Much of the sparkiest moments at the festival come from the programmes of short films. The lack-lustre Gay Britannia programme (26 Mar) suggests that we are dragging our heels behind our American counterparts, but the wry, rhythmic US shorts Letter of Introduction and Wake Up, Jerk Off Etc (both from Male Shots, 26 / 27 Mar) are little treats.

Todd Haynes' first work since Poison is the half-hour Dottie Gets Spanked (Boys' Stories 2, 29 / 30 Mar) and it's the short by which all other shorts must now be judged. In his tale of a doe-eyed boy obsessed with a TV star, Haynes has fashioned a thin wedge of classic American cinema.

The pull of Ryosuke Hashiguchi's A Touch of Fever (27 Mar) is altogether more gradual. This grand, measured picture tells the story of two school-friends who become rent boys. Hashiguchi works in long, mostly static takes; he has great precision and humanity - he even affords the johns some sympathy.

Prince in Hell (27 Mar), though, is a grim haul. It begins with a torrid bout of three-way sex in a cellar and ends with a mutt devouring the excrement falling from a freshly hanged man. In between, Michael Stock's oppressive Berlin fairy tale constitutes the sort of endurance test usually only undertaken on the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme.

FREE TICKETS

We have five pairs of free tickets for the following three programmes: The Swinging Fifties (tomorrow, 6.30), a trawl through the television archives in search of vintage camp; Boys' Stories 2 (Tues, 6.30); and Sandra Bernhard: Confession of a Pretty Lady (next Thurs, 6.15). These await the first readers to arrive with a copy of this page at the Festival Box Office (National Film Theatre, South Bank, London SE1) tomorrow after 11.30am. Offer restricted to one pair of tickets per person.

FASSBINDER OFFER

We have five pairs of tickets for Fassbinder's lesbian classic The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, plus five videos of his last film, an iconoclastic version of Jean Genet's Querelle, courtesy of Artificial Eye, which is releasing the video on 3 May. Applications as above.

NFT box-office: 071-928 3232

(Photograph omitted)