The Mattachine Family main backdrop
The Mattachine Family main poster

The Mattachine Family

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5.3/10 • 3

2025-03-271h 40m

Drama

Celebrate your chosen family.

While Thomas and Oscar are very much in love, after their first foster child returns to his birth mother, they find that they have different ideas about what making a family actually means.

Directors
Andy Vallentine
Writters
Danny Valentine
Editors
Danny Valentine, Jonathan Melin

Top Billed Cast

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  1. Nico Tortorella

    Nico Tortorella

    Thomas Reid

  2. Juan Pablo Di Pace

    Juan Pablo Di Pace

    Oscar Reyes

  3. Emily Hampshire

    Emily Hampshire

    Leah

  4. Heather Matarazzo

    Heather Matarazzo

    Annie

  5. Carl Clemons-Hopkins

    Carl Clemons-Hopkins

    Ted

  6. Colleen Foy

    Colleen Foy

    Sarah

  7. Jake Choi

    Jake Choi

    Jamie

  8. Annie Funke

    Annie Funke

    Laura

  9. Cloie Wyatt Taylor

    Cloie Wyatt Taylor

    Sonia

Reviews1

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Brent Marchant Avatar

Brent Marchant

Jul 5, 2024

5/10

When a film feels it has to beat its message to death to get it across, it loses much of its effectiveness, and that’s very much the case with director Andy Vallentine’s debut narrative feature. The picture tells the story of an upscale Los Angeles gay male couple, Thomas (Nico Tortorella) and Oscar (Juan Pablo Di Pace), who become foster parents to a six-year-old boy (Matthew Jacob Ocampo) whose drug-addicted mother (Colleen Foy) is incarcerated. But, when mom is released from prison, she wins back custody of the child to raise as her own, a development that tears Thomas apart. His anguish is exacerbated by many of his LGBTQ friends becoming parents and Oscar’s lack of interest in fostering another youngster, causing a serious rift in their relationship. To its credit, the premise behind this comedy-drama is admittedly refreshing for a work of gay cinema, but its execution misses the mark due to its unoriginal, undercooked, redundant screenplay. For instance, some of the humor is decidedly catchy, but much of the basic dialogue sounds like it could have been pulled from episodes of Queer as Folk. And then there are the trite characters and scene settings, many of which resemble entries from the Big Book of Gay Stereotypes, a lazy approach to telling this picture’s story. What’s most tiresome, though, are Thomas’s endless laments about losing custody of his foster child and his indecisiveness about how to resolve his despair, script elements that become irritatingly circular and repetitive. Even the title is somewhat problematic in that it could easily be interpreted in several ways, several of which could be taken as misleading (which I’m certain is not what was intended). In short, despite this production’s attempts at doing something inventive and different, “The Mattachine Project” is nevertheless one of those projects that clearly should have gone through a few more rounds of revisions and rewrites before being committed to celluloid.

Media

  • The Mattachine Family poster
  • The Mattachine Family poster
  • The Mattachine Family poster

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Status
Released
Original Language
English
Budget
--
Revenue
--
Keywords
familylgbtqueergay themechosen familyrainbow familyfamily and friendship