Critic Reviews

• David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle

  Wein tackles an incredibly complex array of issues surrounding HIV, focusing largely on Berkowitz, once a nice young Jewish kid at Rutgers who found a lucrative career as an S&M hustler before becoming an activist and co-author.

• Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

  Daryl Wein calls attention both to unjustly neglected pioneering AIDS activist Richard Berkowitz and his still widely ignored groundbreaking promotion of safe sex.

• Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post

  Wein clearly cares for his subject. Yet he leaves room for our admiration and our ambivalence. This is an achievement of heart and of mind.

• Kyle Smith, New York Post

  For gays who remember the nightmare, Sex Positive may be too depressing to watch. But the movie strikes a cautionary tone for a younger generation that, it says, isn't taking the HIV threat seriously.

• Stephen Holden, New York Times

  The movie jolts you with the realization that the AIDS epidemic and the public debate about such issues have retreated so far under the news radar as to be half-forgotten.

• Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

  Though he made an impact on thousands of lives -- or so, this intermittently compelling biography suggests -- AIDS activist Richard Berkowitz remains unknown and uncelebrated, alone and barely scraping by.

• Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru

  A thoroughly fascinating, illuminating and vital documentary for everyone young and old.

• David Noh, Film Journal International

  Scruffy but arresting documentary about an ever-embattled, pioneering fighter in the gay AIDS wars.

• Bill Weber, Slant Magazine

  Sex Positive uses the dual activist/sexual outlaw persona of "safer sex" pioneer Richard Berkowitz as a prism through which to view the life-and-death struggles of an era.

• Karina Longworth, SpoutBlog

  Sex Positive too often looks like something hastily thrown together, which belies the built trust evident between the filmmaker and his subject. Over the course of the film, Berkowitz moves from refusing to discuss certain specifics to spilling in great d

• Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall

  Filmmaker Daryl Wein throws us into the epicentre of this period, when three men matter-of-factly said the unthinkable

• Fr. Chris Carpenter, Orange County and Long Beach Blade

  Definitely worth seeing...many of us literally owe our lives to (the film's subjects).

• Tim Cogshell, Boxoffice Magazine

  A well-documented look back at this history and these people that most audiences will see when it once it reaches PBS...which it will.

Read all 13 critic reviews