What's with the bitchy reviews here? One reviewer even complains about a 'dull sex scene'! Did the negative reviewers expect porn? This film is about humans coming together to fight for their human rights, social and civil rights. And it's not a documentary! The movie itself is not a great and wonderful achievement in cinema art. What's great about it is the powerful message it brings into todays world when it is most needed.The message -- no matter who you are or where you come from and you know right from wrong - when you see or experience injustice, abuse, discrimination, take a stand and fight back. That's what is being brought to light in this film.The gay community are not outcast to be used and tossed out as trash by people of hypocritically high religious, political, and social standing. There are religious persons, political leaders, and greedy capitalist businesses that wrap themselves in the American flag, arm themselves with Jesus, the Bible, and guns and would be pleased and fulfilled with self gratitude to see the LGBT community tortured, destroyed, and killed. That's what this movie is about! It shows victims of life being forced to the bottom of society because they love differently. And once you are at the bottom 'to survive' is your goal and then you are labeled 'trash'. Your only defense is to fight back and crack a few skulls of the oppressors that pushed these people away and make them stay hidden. And that includes the family, the good religious families that see no wrong in destroying their own.Near the end of Stonewall there is a scene when Danny Winters tells Ray that when he was fighting back, pushing the cops away, screaming that they are people with rights - he felt most alive! He felt like a human with purpose! In other words he had found himself and he's not a bad person (as the people back in Indiana would have him feel about himself). And his trip back to visit friends in that cold hearted backward thinking state was a cathartic moment for him as then he realizes he's on the right path.Why so many are trashing this film is suspect. Did they actually watch the movie? This film will stay in your thoughts for quite sometime if you actually think about what life was and still is for the gay community!

First off, I am gay. I was mercilessly bullied as a child back in the late 70's early 80s. It's nothing new.I have read books, articles, and seen documentaries on the Stonewall riots......having said that, the LGBT community's lynch campaign regarding the film Stonewall has once again proved that as a group we are so self indulgent and petty, so mired in our own little dramas that we cannot see the big picture.We should have lined up by the thousands to see this film (so starved we are about representation of our history, especially since integration) good or bad, accurate as we would want it to be or not. Instead what we have done is gleefully, shrilly and self-righteously and most of all in the most ignorant of ways, we have torpedoed it. What we have also done is send Hollywood a message that we as a group do not want to see movies about our history because we are so focused on being divisive as a group, and so intent into looking out for our own self as opposed to our collective well being.We always have been selfish, petty, vain, superficial...in the 70s right after Stonewall, the athletic muscle boys scoffed and ridiculed the political queens because they were too busy being liberated and getting laid.Black America stands together and supports each other....Tyler Perry can crank out countless drivel with his Medea movies and that demographic will flock. Any instance of police brutality towards an African American and that community ,rightly so, will make their voices heard.For us that is not the case. Countless gay bashings and no one ever riots in the streets.Two films have been made about the single most important event in our history. One in the 1990's and this last one. And what is our reaction? To squash any chance for some kid in the mid west to see it and have a spark of interest set off to get him or her and everything in between to go read up on the actual event.POSSIBLE SPOILER: The film is not bad, it's not great, the script is a little weak, but everyone is represented. Martha P. has her moment in the limelight. A Hispanic character very much resembling Sylvia Rivera comes very close to throwing that first brick. And the lesbian dragged out kicking and screaming that howls anguishedly "Why are you just standing there, why doesn't anyone help me?!" is featured prominently.So there's a white kid from the Midwest that provides the narrative for the story.Big deal. One thing for sure, this could have been a chance to provide awareness of this event, and like self righteous idiots we have screwed this one up. You can be sure now that Hollywood will steer clear of anything dealing with LGBT issues. Good luck making that movie on whatever fluid sexuality topic now. We've killed it. A round of applause.

Stonewall happened in June 1969. A gay bar named Stonewall was raided by the police in NYC. That was a common occurrence back then and all the drag queens, gay men and lesbians usually went quietly. But something happened this night. A drag queen fought back and everybody joined in. It turned into an all out riot with the police being attacked by the crowd. It was the beginning of gay liberation. This movie uses a fictional protagonist named Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine) who moves from Indiana to NYC to attend college. His family has disowned him after he came out. He falls in with a group of gay guys and drag queens led, more or less, by flamboyant Ray (Jonny Beauchamp). It follows his coming of age (hitting all the familiar notes) and accepting gay love and romance. It climaxes with the first gay pride march in 1970.This has been blasted by critics everywhere. The largest complaints have been that the movie is historically inaccurate (this is true) and it whitewashes the story by giving us a white "hero" when it was a black drag queen that started it up. I can deal with that. This doesn't claim to be a documentary. Other movies that cover important historical events have used fictional protagonists. Why not this one? However that does not excuse the boring and thoroughly predictable script. It was insulting how clichéd and obvious this film was. Every single coming of age cliché you've ever seen is trotted out and put through its paces. Acting doesn't help. Irvine was tall, handsome and a total blank as Danny. He had the same confused look on his face during the entire film. Even worse his British accent slipped through a few times. It had my audience laughing. Jonathan Rhys Meyers (a good actor) appears to be drugged out in his role as Trevor. Only Beauchamp shows any life and gives a great performance. Also the film DOES look good and they capture the late 1960s fads and fashions perfectly. The recreation of the Stonewall bar is excellent too. It looks exactly like it's been described in books. Still this doesn't change that the fact that this is a terrible and boring picture. Check out the 1995 film "Stonewall" for a MUCH more accurate dramatization of the riot. Avoid this one.

Roland Emmerich's biggest mistake was calling the movie "Stonewall" and marketing it as if it were the actual story of the rebellion. It gave people the wrong expectation. It's not a movie about Stonewall. It's a movie about a Midwestern gay man whose story takes place on Christopher street at the time of the riots. It's also in part the story of the first person he meets in New York, played by Jonny Beauchamp, who steals the movie. It's basically a very oddball romance and coming-out story. People wanted an accurate historical epic about the importance of the riots, and the movie isn't that and was never meant to be. For what it really is, it's a very good movie. Like most "historical" movies there are inaccuracies. The worst distortion is giving Danny the "first brick." That's upset a lot of people, but in the dramatic structure of the movie it's as much about Danny's becoming himself--a gay man throwing away his shame--as it is about the situation he finds himself in. The police are depicted as "bad" in the black-and-white morality of an old-fashioned hero-versus-villain Saturday morning serial. But beyond those inaccuracies and the impossibility of recreating Christopher Street as it was (which seems to be especially upsetting to some New York viewers), the movie is as faithful to its surrounding event as any Shakespeare history play to its, including sympathetic depictions of a very diverse neighborhood of LGBT types. As a long-time gay activist, I liked the movie a great deal. It feels real as I remember things to have been 46 years ago. I felt a genuine emotional rush during and after the riot. The movie ends with typical historical clean-ups, telling us what became of the real people, like Marsha P Johnson and others who appear in the movie, and mentioning the additional nights of rioting and how they went on to be regarded in LGBT history. For me the saddest thing about this film is the divisions it's exposed among various components of the LGBT community. This history belongs to all of us, black, brown, white, gay, lesbian, transgender, drag queen, troll, twink, and so on; if we can't honor it in all of our variations, no one else will either. Go to see it as a good story well told, not as a factual documentary. I write this knowing some of you won't be able to, some of you won't want to, and some of you won't believe me. I wish there were something I could do about that, but there isn't.