Stress Positions

The cast is enthusiastic and often very funny, and, as a filmmaker, Hammel is one to watch.

If the film concentrated more on this and less on the increasingly chaotic proceedings on display, it might have become more than an endless litany of smug obnoxiousness.

If some of the points seem muddy, the filmmaking is expressive and deliberate. With shimmer, shadow and verve, “Stress Positions” captures the often hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” moment.

The movie has its funny moments, and even some halfway-poignant ones, but it occasionally gives one the feeling of watching a bawdy New York-set sitcom and listening to a segment of “This American Life” at the same time.

might be the first genuinely enjoyable film made about the pandemic.

Hammel, who also stars, has crafted a film that's part farce and part brutal satire of the queer Brooklyn bourgeoisie.

The prevailing sense of imbalance and frenzy is by design, but that doesn’t mean the artistic drive will be to everyone’s taste.

“Stress Positions” is the cinematic equivalent of literature. It feels as if it is an adaptation of a novel with narrators who understand others more than they understand themselves.

At turns laugh-out-loud funny, deeply melancholic, and downright radical, it arrives as the most invigorating and challenging film likely to be slotted under LGBT Voices on a streaming service one day.

A remarkable COVID-set flick that throws ripe tomatoes at American liberal millennials in all their blunt performative mindsets.