Frameline50 Reviews: ‘Drunken Noodles,’ ‘On the Road,’ ‘Sparks,’ ‘Strange River’

For half a century, the nonprofit organization Frameline has championed queer cinema in a mission to connect filmmakers and audiences in the Bay Area and around the world. Established in 1976, the organization has been hosting the longest-running queer film festival in the world, and they’ve pulled out all the stops for the 50th anniversary.

For the festival’s golden jubilee, I’m pulling the curtain back on four of its offerings: Lucio Castro’s quiet and resplendent Drunken Noodles, David Pablos’s simmering crime drama On the Road, Fergus Campbell’s quirky teenage saga Sparks, and Jaume Claret Muxart’s hypnotic debut Strange River.

Drunken Noodles (Dir. Lucio Castro)

Like a crisp breeze on a warm summer night, across its brief runtime Drunken Noodles evokes a gay, metropolitan ennui that could be dismissed as trite musings if not for director Lucio Castro’s deft hand behind the camera, both with his frame and his performers. Castro transmits a highly specific joy in the small moments of traipsing around a city as a queer man with your stupidly wide social circle and endless opportunity for enlightenment or brisk pleasures, sometimes both. In vignettes, Castro traces Adnan (Laith Khalifeh) through slices of a summer in New York City. In distinct sections, outlined through Sal Salandra’s exquisite fiber arts title cards, Adnan takes on house and catsitting for his uncle while balancing a gig at an art gallery with nighttime cruising, transported back to a previous soiree with one of the older gay artists the gallery represents, and a cabinbound getaway with an ex. 

These sections’ temporal relationship to each other is vague as Castro plays with time and space, breaking reality to embrace the surreal, the magical. These breaks from form, otherwise grounded and defined by confidently sedentary camerawork, dazzle and imbue each segment with a sense of wonder that transcends their already compelling observations about the mundane. Those latter glances often come in Castro’s palpable discomfort with the hyper-convenience of modern life. From on demand food delivery to online cruising, all the joys of life, once found through interactions both commonplace and unorthodox, have been digitized and monetized. Adnan’s journey across disparate chapters of time tracks a relationship between art, desire, and the natural world around us. Castro takes such joy in silently expounding on the minute beauties of gay life, in little gestures between generations or campfire confessions alike. It’s refreshingly free without explaining itself in the slightest.

As the film progresses, each chapter is shaped by sex and Adnan’s partners in it. Invoking the still frame photography of Gus van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho at times while more straightforward elsewhere, Castro’s approach to sex and desire is playful in a way that eludes shame without eliding conversations around the slipperiness of desire between partners and with the self. In each segment, night falls and the film will slip into a space between spaces where reality bends and reveals new facets of life to Adnan, some disconcerting, some gorgeous, all revelatory. These breaks from the day-to-day affect Adnan as they did me while watching, leaving me a little mystified with a lighter pep in my step. Drunken Noodles is a summer treat that left me with the same elation a good collection of short stories does. That’s no small feat, but it’s a greatly appreciated one.

Grade: A

On the Road (Dir. David Pablo)

Has every truck stop been a cruising hotspot over the years? They’re the perfect fit for it, after all. Dark and secluded, populated with lonely professionals whose job necessitates isolation and laser focus, truck stops are ports for ships passing in the night and a perfectly logical, if sometimes dangerous, spot for a brief and auspicious meet. One of these meets is actually not between Veneno (Victor Prieto Simental), a young gay man on the run from powerful and dangerous people, and Muñeco (Osvaldo Sánchez), a married truck driver whose boundaries start to soften. They meet at the stop, but Veneno just asks for transportation. Slowly, their boundaries with each other start to soften as they strike up a business deal around Veneno’s drug dealing until Veneno finds himself in a deadly situation and they both get into more than they signed up for.

An age-gap trucker crime romance is a fresh pitch by any measure, but writer/director David Pablo doesn’t rely on his originality to succeed. Rather, his vision tracks a muted saga of two men defying their circumstances with understated confidence. Daring to open up to each other in a world where masculinity is a violent force that must be embraced in order to survive, these men’s journey is captured by a filmmaker so sure of his ideas that he often takes his foot off the script’s gas and relies on his camera, making for a refreshing independent film in a market with plenty of writers jumping to display their lexicon. While sometimes ostentatious, Pablo’s direction is assured and his eye is precise in crafting each image. I wish they were consistently in conversation with each other, instead of burning into your brain and disappearing until the next studied tableau strikes. This intentionality behind the film is its greatest strength and weakness.

Neither lead ever leaves their heart on their sleeve, instead they burrow into each character’s repression; Veneno’s hard exterior is such a delicate performance of necessity, it hurts, and Muñeco’s exterior is raised so high that when it gets knocked about, it’s revelatory. Their dynamic could support the film entirely, so it’s a bit of a shame that the third act falls into high melodrama, enmeshed in straight crime thrills that don’t feel grounded in the world so wonderfully established. There’s a cruelty to the third act that feels unearned and aggravates so thoroughly only because the drama preceding it was enough to sustain. 

Grade: B-

Sparks (Dir. Fergus Campbell)

Though we were all annoying teenagers once, this does not immediately mean that bearing witness to annoying teen adventures will be relatable. Presenting itself from within a twee cocoon, wrapped in 20-years-marinated Juno debris, Fergus Campbell’s Sparks is both about what it means to try and exist as a landlocked teenager with nowhere to go but where your mind can take you. It’s also about what it was like to have a FilmStruck subscription at 15. Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade) stars as Cleo, a teenager who has been dumped by a cartoonishly antagonistic parent in Sparks, Nevada, where desert plains sprawl for eternity and culture seems a far away dream. She runs into The Crop, a squad of teens built on the exertion of affectations, who tell her the tall tale of a nearby reservoir which they believe has the power to transport you through time, if utilized properly. After finding a book on French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard, Cleo is determined to get herself to 1960s Paris. 

Campbell’s strength in capturing the often aimless pain of teenhood is disarming and Sparks’s most striking quality. Campbell situates his characters, who wish to perform a larger-than-life persona within a vast space that threatens to swallow them whole, in great contrast with one another and is canny at showing how a domineering personality can force an entire social scene to be at their beck and call. Yet, there’s an overreliance on these teens’ penchant for explaining themselves, or who they wish they were, that quickly set my teeth on edge. How this movie lands will all but certainly depend on your interest in hyperactive editing, how much you reflect on your childhood, and how much Adult Swim programming defined you at that time.

Fisher is innately funny and Cleo’s identity crisis, stuck in a new town and jumping at the chance to rebuild their identity whole cloth in the image of a different place and time, does resonate as it would for most overeager movie nerds remembering high school, but the rest of The Crop is anonymous. Nobody stands out except for the co-lead, Charlie B. Foster’s Antoine, who takes over the film around the halfway point. Antoine is in a DL relationship, but once obsessed with Cleo, refuses to really acknowledge it. There’s a very young, Tumblr and Discord-y queer influence in the film that feels refreshing and like a preview of what Gen Z filmmaking will look like outside of the much discussed horror hits of May. Unfortunately, Sparks lacks the clarity or bombast it needs  Between Cleo and The Crop, everyone is going through an identity crisis, but so is the film. When the last third tries to play for emotions instead of laughs, it’s clear that Campbell’s script, like the town it occupies, is too open to allow for real ideas to take hold and ends up as a promising but disappointing debut.

Grade: D+

Strange River (Dir. Jaume Claret Muxart)

The soundscape of a river can only provide so much peace and tranquility before profundity turns into navel gazing. The splendour of Strange River’s first twenty and last ten minutes suggest a gorgeous short film that could stab your heart before mending it, but Jaume Claret Muxart’s feature overstays its welcome and then some. While on a family trip along the Danube, restless Catalan teenager Dídac (Jan Monter) begins to explore his feelings, possibly realizing his queerness. As Dídac becomes entranced by a mysterious boy (Francesco Wenz) whose emergence from the river defies logic, the strains of the family trip and of his own emotions begin to simmer, but revelations about the boy and the river start to help Dídac see life through new eyes. 

Muxart’s film has its moments of beauty and occasionally feels as serene as the whole film wishes it were. The opening bike ride and closing close-up are both breathtaking in their own ways, but cinematographer Pablo Paloma’s work never stops stunning. He captures the environment and the performers with the same hazy gaze that brings forth the feeling of a memory half-remembered and a dream half-forgotten. Warm tones and blissfully calm waters and swaying branches make the film an easy watch, but eventually Muxart reveals he has little else going on. Monter’s performance is captivating and does evoke the sort of Eric Rohmer protagonist Muxart seems fixated on replicating. Monter’s body language completely transports you to the years where you had to navigate what new desires meant for you, especially when they mean confronting your own queerness. Nausicaa Bonnín and Jordi Oriol are wonderful as Dídac’s accepting and encouraging parents, and the former shines near the end as we learn of her confounding connection with the boy from the river. Muxart doesn’t have the confidence to fully lean into the surreal or to ground his film in uncomfortable, real emotion.

Toeing the line between the real and the magical ends up feeling noncommittal by the film’s conclusion that it, while beautiful, still falls flat. This plagues much of Strange River, but the beauty is undeniable. Comparisons to Call Me by Your Name are inevitable but will ring hollow and reductive considering Luca Guadagnino’s full-throated confrontation with desire. Similarly, Rohmer’s summertime sadnesses never shied away from the uncomfortable. Muxart’s eye for beauty is in a similar vein, but he cannot assemble the disparate emotions from scene to scene in order to build a fuller piece. In any case, if you want to linger by some vistas, Pablo Paloma has you covered. 

Grade: C

These reviews are from the 50th Frameline Film Festival. 

• Author
• Recent Posts

August Hammel

August Hammel is a recent graduate from San Francisco State University’s journalism program and has written reviews and conducted interviews for AwardsWatch. He was born in San Diego and lives in San Francisco. When not writing, he can be found in a theater as he searches for what he wants to write about next and why. August can be reached at his email augusthammel@gmail.com.

Latest posts by August Hammel (see all)

• Interview: With ‘Drunken Noodles,’ Writer/Director Lucio Castro Takes on Sex and Queer Life in the Age of Apps with Grace and Honesty - June 26, 2026
• Frameline50 Reviews: ‘Drunken Noodles,’ ‘On the Road,’ ‘Sparks,’ ‘Strange River’ - June 24, 2026
• ‘Girls Like Girls’ Review: Let’s Go, Lesbians, Let’s Go [C+] - June 20, 2026