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Bros Reviews

Beyond its historical value, the movie is relevant because it puts characters at the center of its narrative who have rarely been the protagonists in mainstream love stories. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 26, 2024

Eichner hits most of the right notes, lovingly lambasting queer culture, but this movie follows too many of the same romcom tropes as its heterosexual contemporaries.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 18, 2024

I’ve never experienced such whiplash during a movie

Full Review | Apr 24, 2024

It did not need to have a theatrical release…throw it on HBOMax

While the film does a fine job taking romantic comedy tropes and giving them the gay treatment, they remain tropes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 5, 2023

Bros is a genuine, authentic, insanely hilarious breath of fresh air. Clever satirical comedy rips out loud back-to-back laughs throughout the entire runtime without ever causing viewers to lose their ear-to-ear smile.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 25, 2023

A down right heartfelt, hilarious, & most importantly RAUNCHY! They truly don’t make films like this anymore & Bros breaks through as a must watch! Billy is perfect, Luke is a revelation, & Stoller is back with one of his best.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Bros stands alone as an honest and funny depiction of two cis gay men not sure of what they’re looking for. They just know they don’t want to do it alone. It is laugh-out-loud funny at a time when we desperately need to be laughing in a movie theater.

Bros is too obsessed with its own ideas of grandeur. Like the first-of-its-kind LGBTQ history museum Bobby is trying to open, Bros believes that it will single-handedly save queer cinema. However, queer cinema never needed saving in the first place.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Eichner has made something that he can be proud of and hopefully it will open the door for more diverse queer voices to be heard.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 14, 2023

The funniest movie in a long time.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Feb 6, 2023

A resounding reset of the rom-com, Bros injects a modern reality into a stagnant genre.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 6, 2023

Bros is one of the best romantic comedies of the decade, offering plenty of laughs and maybe even a few tears by the end of it

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Feb 2, 2023

Beneath its sometimes too-obvious meta examination of commercialized queer romance and comedy, Bros manages a sincere exploration of what it means to experience and depict queer love in its truly radical nature.

Full Review | Original Score: 7.5/10 | Jan 4, 2023

Bobby and Aaron both look surprised, as we always are by love. Bros is wonderfully funny, and quietly subversive. Take your parents.

Full Review | Dec 23, 2022

Bros warmly embraces the cosy conventions of a boy meets boy love story and tempers emotional gooeyness with the acerbic wit of lead actor Billy Eichner.

Full Review | Original Score: 7.5/10 | Dec 17, 2022

A thoughtful, tremendously funny treat and one of the best comedies of recent years, consider Bros worthy of a fist bump.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 16, 2022

Bros is a sweet, raunchy R comedy filled with a positive message and indelible performances especially by Eichner himself.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Dec 10, 2022

If the film lacks something, it's being more self-aware, not so much in reference to the clichés of the LGBTQ+ community (there are a few mentions of that), but more to the stereotypes of gender and romance in American cinema. Full review in Spanish.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 30, 2022

Riffing on romcom conventions while also shamelessly indulging in them, this is a breezy, enjoyable romp that does a good job of commenting on the differences between gay and straight dating culture.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 28, 2022

Universal Pictures

Summary Two gay men maybe, possibly, probably, stumble towards love. Maybe. They're both very busy.

Directed By : Nicholas Stoller

Written By : Billy Eichner, Nicholas Stoller

Where to Watch

Billy Eichner

Luke macfarlane, miss lawrence, dot-marie jones, eve lindley, monica raymund, guillermo diaz, jai rodriguez, amanda bearse, debra messing, justin covington, ryan faucett, becca blackwell, harvey fierstein, critic reviews.

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‘Bros’ Review: Boy Meets Boy Meets Multiplex

Billy Eichner plays a moody podcaster who has sworn off relationships, but just might find himself in one anyway, in this gay romantic comedy.

Share full article

By Amy Nicholson

The comedian Billy Eichner is not a person you’d approach for love advice. Fans of his long-running viral videos, “Billy on the Street,” in which Eichner accosts New Yorkers to scream about pop culture, would not leap to list listening, empathy, communication or patience among his skills. Even his gentler sitcom was titled, justly, “Difficult People.”

Yet, through a quirk of fate — combined with a century of inertia — “Bros,” a semisweet, sexually frank queer valentine, makes Eichner the grimacing, skeptical face of the first major studio romantic comedy to star two adult gay men: the actor Luke Macfarlane, who came out publicly in 2008 , and Eichner himself, who co-wrote the script with the director Nicholas Stoller (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Neighbors”). As a meta-joke within the movie, Eichner’s character recoils when asked to create a gay rom-com with mass appeal. “Am I going to be in the middle of some high-speed chase and all of a sudden fall in love with Ice Cube?”

But the film itself has said yes, accepting the responsibility to make a hit able to break the glass rainbow in a time when buying a ticket to “Wonder Woman” or “Black Panther” or, now, “Bros,” is equated with waving a placard on the steps of the Supreme Court. “Bros” is hyper-conscious that it’s a landmark built on a fault line. No matter how many ideas it crams into its quick-paced plot, it’s doomed to fall short of representing an entire group of people — and it knows it shouldn’t have to. As such, Eichner’s challenge makes for a conflicted Cupid.

Eichner’s onscreen avatar, Bobby Leiber, is a strident variation on his persona: a podcast host who dominates conversations as though he’s the only one with a mic. Bobby blames being single on a litany of universal laments that dovetail with queer-specific gripes, say, guys on Grindr who type, “Must see pic of ass,” forcing him to fetch a ring light and razor.

At a promo party for a new app called Zellweger (“For gays who want to talk about actresses and go to bed,” his friend, played by Guy Branum, describes), Bobby meets Aaron (Macfarlane) and dismisses the hunky lawyer as yet another gay paradox: a man who’s both strappingly solid and emotionally vaporous. (Cleverly, the cinematographer Brandon Trost and the editor Daniel Gabbe assemble their first scenes together so that Macfarlane appears to vanish mid-conversation — literalized ghosting.) Neither man claims to believe in affairs that last longer than happily-ever-next-Thursday. Instead, Bobby and Aaron are competitively blasé, fumbling through a relationship that starts with a first-date foursome and hits its romantic climax with a text that reads, “What’s up.”

The dilemma of the film isn’t will-they-or-won’t-they ? Macfarlane, a seasoned lead of a dozen-plus straight Hallmark holiday romances including “Sense, Sensibility and Snowmen” and “A Shoe Addict’s Christmas,” is skilled at a Labradoresque eyebrow crinkle that could make anyone swoon. The suspense comes in watching Eichner struggle to reconcile his galaxy-brained cynicism with mainstream rom-com touchstones: Nat King Cole on the soundtrack, a sidewalk sprint inspired by “When Harry Met Sally …” and a happy ending even he just might believe in, a little.

“Bros” is more convincing when it digs into Bobby’s bitterness. His problem isn’t that the world refuses to support queer love. It’s that at 40, he can’t bring himself to tear down the walls he built when it didn’t. Bobby is a battle-scarred veteran of 20th-century homophobia suffering 21st-century whiplash. Acceptance has moved fast — almost too fast for Bobby, who sneers that the Hallheart Channel — a Hallmark lampoon — is pandering to sexual liberation with films like “A Holly Poly Christmas.” At the same time, Bobby’s friends are celebrating major commitments: throuples, surrogate-delivered triplets, even a gender-reveal orgy, and his diverse collaborators on the board of an L.G.B.T.Q. history museum consider white cisgender men to be mothballed relics.

No one at the museum can agree on what exhibits to place inside, a subplot that allows queer people in the film to openly debate which stories it wants to tell about itself. Must it still prioritize struggle over joy? Is there room for everyone’s point of view? And how can today’s storytellers honor people from the past whose passions may have been suppressed or erased? As a partial answer to these questions, the board creates a Hall of Bisexuals where Amy Schumer and Kenan Thompson play goofy, grinning holograms of Eleanor Roosevelt and James Baldwin. Let scholars argue about the display’s accuracy. It accomplishes what “Bros,” like every other rom-com, aims to do: charm audiences with a spirited, corny facsimile of life.

Bros Rated R for sex, swearing and a quick snort of poppers. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.

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