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Scatty, commitment-phobic photographer Ashleigh Sumner is luxuriating in another of her erotic reveries when girlfriend Jill Bennett calls and asks her to pick up the prints they need to land a lucrative graphic design contract with Bennett's go-getter ex, Cathy DeBuono. Sumner leaves immediately. But she is easily distracted. Moreover, she is easily distracted on numerous occasions and her cause is not helped by the fact that identical incidents begin climaxing in different ways. With a yappy dog, a runaway subway carriage, raunchy traffic warden Angelyna Martinez and old flame Jessica Graham all intent on making things as difficult as possible, it's touch and go whether Sumner will get across San Francisco in time to clinch the deal and keep Bennett out of the covetous DeBuono's clutches.

With Seidler and Siler sharing writing, directing and producing chores, this is very much a team effort. Credit is also due to cinematographer Jennifer Durbin and editor Eli Olson, who keep the visceral action hurtling along, and Jett Attwood and Mollie McClure, whose respective animated and photo-story interludes work much more effectively than the clumsily expository digressions in which the principals lie on a couch and discuss their sex lives with therapist Lisa Dewey. Sumner makes a spirited heroine, but one suspects she was cast more with the copious running and softcore bedroom sequences in mind than anything more dramatically taxing.

Developed from a film school project, Aleksi Salmenperä's Producing Adults can't decide whether it's a romcom or a serious drama about responsibility in relationships. Moreover, in striving not to succumb to the clichés of the same-sex love story, it ends up over-complicating what should have been a simple study of conflicting priorities.

Finnish speed skater Kari-Pekka Toivonen is so set on making the Olympic squad that he prevaricates when girlfriend Minna Haapkylä suggests they have a child. However, when she insists that they begin trying in earnest, Toivonen takes drastic action to ensure Haapkylä can't conceive. Consequently, she finds herself confiding in Minttu Mustakallio, a doctor at the fertility clinic where she works as a counsellor, and they become closer after Haapkylä rejects a clumsy offer to impregnate her from colleague Dick Idman. But while Mustakallio is ready to commit to Haapkylä, she is less sure of her sexuality and her wavering prompts Mustakallio to date brother Pekka Strang's slacker buddy Antti Raivio, who promises to grow up and get a job if she will marry him.

Ably played by a solid cast, this is an occasionally thoughtful insight into the enormity of parenting. Haapkylä particularly impresses as a woman so wrapped up in baby dreams that she fails to take anyone else's feelings into account. But the picture loses momentum when the focus strays from her on to the less than compelling Mustakallio subplot. Moreover, while cinematographer Tuomo Hutri manages some nice nocturnal shots of downtown Helsinki, his camera is too often restricted to shooting the action in static two-shots that betray Salmenperä's television background.

Antonio Hens similarly struggles to meld contrasting storylines in Clandestinos. As a result, this misfiring comedy thriller fails to convince either as a celebration of adolescent sexuality or as an exposé of the terrorist potency of the Basque separatist movement.

Having broken out of a juvenile detention centre, Israel Rodríguez persuades illegal Moroccan immigrant Mehroz Arif and freewheeling Mexican Hugo Catalán to travel to Madrid to hook up with ETA bigwig Luis Hostalot. However, as the latter is plotting a major operation and remains resolutely undercover, the teenage trio decides to slum it with good-time girls Pepa Aniorte and Inma Cuevas. Arif and Catalán seem happy with this arrangement. But Rodríguez is determined to do something for the cause and he builds a homemade bomb. However, as he has also been making money by hustling and counts police chief Juan Luis Galiardo among his clients, it's not long before the law is closing in on the novice cell.

Consistently threatening to say something significant about Spanish politics, juvenile morality and the dangers of city living, this impulsive picture is too easily distracted by the bedroom antics of the handsome cast. The ease with which Rodríguez procures the ingredients for his device is soberingly amusing. But the recurring flashbacks are intrusive and the denouement a credibility-straining disappointment. Clearly influenced by Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992) and Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich (2004), this lacks the first's dramatic complexity and the last's erotic audacity.

The intrigue quotient is much higher in Gabriel Fleming's The Lost Coast, a pseudo-Mumblecore mystery that is held together by an e-mail that is voiced over by one of the protagonists to his faraway fiancée. Running just 75 minutes, this is a lean inquiry into unresolved feelings that benefits enormously from Nils Kenaston's meticulously composed digital imagery.

As they trudge around San Francisco in search of Ecstasy on Halloween, former high school friends Ian Scott McGregor, Lucas Alifano and Chris Yule crash parties and reminisce about the past. However, when Yule learns about a fling that Alifano had with the avowedly straight McGregor, he begins to pry and ignores gal pal Lindsay Benner's suggestion that certain incidents are best left alone. As Alifano throws himself into encounters with strangers at each new venue, McGregor wrestles with his identity and his growing frustration with Yule's provocation.

With its insistent visuals and unquestioning attitude to the hedonism of America's gay capital, this is a deceptively insouciant odyssey. Fleming ends up skirting the issue of where curiosity ends and homosexuality begins and occasionally risks sermonising. But the boldness of the non-linear structure and a sure sense of place - whether the action is staged on on the teeming Castro, a westbound bus or down on the waterfront - enlivens what would otherwise be a rather formulaic scenario.

A rite of passage bromance also proves central to Todd Verow's Vacationland, a low-budget, semi-autobiographical melodrama that borrows liberally from the shock tactics employed by New Queer Cinema icon Gregg Araki to reveal the limitless downsides of growing up as a closeted gay in a backwater town like Bangor, Maine. With a cast chosen more for their looks than their acting ability or their suitability to play teenagers, this is a somewhat shambolic affair. Yet, it just about gets by on Verow's vibrancy.

Brad Hallowell has always had a crush on his football jock classmate Gregory J. Lucas. However, he has never acted upon it and they are now dating Jennifer Stackpole and Mindy Hofman respectively. Things are tough at home, with his mother seeing an abusive suitor and sister Hilary Mann desperate to break free. But it's Hallowell who leaves home, in order to raise some money for art school by acting as a model-cum-caretaker for ailing painter Charles Ard. His sense of emancipation gets the better of him, however, and he not only seduces French teacher Nathan Johnson in the hope of improving his grades, but he also bumps into the man who raped him as a child and kisses Lucas as he crashes out on his bed.

Short on character insight and encumbered with numerous undeveloped subplots, this rattles between moments of nude posturing, go-go dancing, cottaging, blackmail, abuse and revenge without any appreciable understanding of dramatic trajectory. The performances are lifeless and details like Lucas's penchant for shoplifting owe more to Verow's personal recollection than plot logic. Yet there is a passion behind the maladroitness that makes this strangely compelling.

The same is true of Everett Lewis's Lucky Bastard, which plunges a complacent bourgeois into a seedy world that arouses his darker side.

Los Angeles architect Patrick Tatten should be content. He has a thriving restoration business with Timothy Cole and a loving relationship with Johnny Kostery. But when the latter goes on a trip, Tatten allows himself to be seduced in a convenience store rest-room by dangerous hunk Dale Dymkoski.

Tatten is convinced he can teach Dymkoski that there is more to living than sordid self-destruction. But he quickly finds himself becoming addicted to the thrill of illicit sex, drug-fuelled dance nights and the risk of allowing his ordered existence to slide out of control. Dymkoski begins to fall for Tatten and promises to mend his ways. But he insists that his new lover makes some lifestyle choices of his own. Inanimate performances and an obsession with surfaces undermine this laudable bid to do something different with the cross-tracks fatal attraction scenario. Tatten's selfish thrill-seeker is a morally reprehensible and an unwaveringly one-dimensional character and Lewis might have been better advised to focus on the more nuanced Dymkoski. However, he effectively establishes the tempting twilight world that makes Tatten's descent vaguely plausible.

The tone is more refined in another redemption tale, Biju Viswanath's Marathon, which chronicles the romance between American Poet Laureate William Meredith and younger painter Richard Harteis. As played by Alec Dana and Bristol Pomeroy, this is a serviceable adaptation of Harteis's memoir. But, despite its earnestness, it feels more like a Disease of the Week teleplay than a celebration of the bond between devoted artists.

In 1983, Meredith suffered a stroke and was forced to resign his position at Connecticut College. Afflicted with expressive aphasia and unable to write, the creator of `Captain, My Captain' underwent intensive therapy and defied doctors convinced he could live for another 150 years and never regain his poetic powers. Much of the credit was due to Harteis, whose experience as a marathon runner gave him the endurance to coax Meredith through phases of doubt and despair. However, his mission was less jeopardised by Meredith's physical condition than the resignation of the writer's envious sister Elizabeth (Donna Del Bueno), whose bid to prevent him from undergoing an expensive course of rehabilitation was frustrated by his stepmother (Fran Tripp).

With Beth Campbell showing well as Harteis's soulmate, Marian, this is a tasteful and heartfelt biopic. Dana proves dignified in distress and there is a poignancy about the sequence in which he finally feels able to compose. However, Viswanath is a more accomplished cinematographer than he is a screenwriter or director, as the lyricism of the imagery is often swamped by the earnestness of the performances, the dogged inspirationalism of the script and the tutting disapproval of a society whose legal system refuses to recognise the legitimacy of same-sex partnerships.

Deeply indebted to the glossy melodramatics of Douglas Sirk, Casper Andreas's Between Love & Goodbye centres on another creative pairing, as aspiring French actor Justin Tensen and wannabe New York musician Simon Miller begin to express their shifting emotions in a series of revealing songs. However, this knowing reworking of the backstage musical template is a touch too self-conscious for its own good.

Having married lesbian Jane Elliott to secure his green card, Tensen moves in his singer-songwriting lover. However, Miller's promiscuous transsexual `sister' Rob Harmon arrives at the same time after several months of silence. Daggers drawn with Miller since their mother committed suicide, Harmon heartily disapproves of the union and coaxes Tensen into joining her new band in order to drive a wedge between them. But a failed breast implant procedure and a breach of monogamous faith changes the dynamic of threesome's tempestuous alliance.

Deftly integrating the numbers into the narrative, Andreas demonstrates his familiarity with musical tropes. But, for all the lustre of Jon Fordham's images, they lack the genre's customary kinetic energy and, thus, this winds up being more akin to a soap than opera.

One might also have expected more rambunctious fun from a film entitled The Big Gay Musical. But Andreas and co-director Fred M Caruso are drawn more towards backstage melodrama than high camp. Thus, while this demonstrates a firm grasp of generic convention, it doesn't always integrate its weightier passages with the same finesse as it incorporates the song-and-dance routines.

Tired of sitting through earnest straight productions, queer critic Michael Musto insists it's time somebody staged `a big gay musical' and the result is Adam & Steve: Just the Way God Made `Em, a rousing lampoon of religious intolerance, which is just about to be unleashed on its first Off-Broadway audiences. The opening action is set in the Garden of Eden, as a super-fey God (Steve Hayes) deposits his first gay lovers in a section next to some apple-munching bigots. However, the scene soon shifts to an evangelical camp dedicated to the conversion and cure of the deviant.

Heading the cast are Daniel Robinson and Joey Dudding, who are every bit as conflicted as their characters. When he's not hosting open mic nights at a club for washed up theatricals, Robinson is convincing himself that he should abandon his search for the perfect mate and bed hop like the ripped chorus boys with whom he shares a dressing room. Dudding, on the other hand, is a Christian virgin who has yet to inform his highly conservative folks about his sexuality.

Much of the Genesis segment of the stage show feels like a rehash of Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, while the Manhattan themes of coming out, HIV and finding love in a cruel world also feel overly familiar. The cast works hard, with porn star Brent Corrigan cameoing as a soft-hearted hustler. But jokes like rebranding the Bible `The Informational Book of Living Examples' fall as flat as many of the musical routines, with the honourable exception of Davidson's cabaret turn, `I Wanna Be a Slut', and Liz McCartney's showstopping production number, `As I Am'. Short on wit and pizzazz, this pales beside the likes of Todd Graff's Camp (2003) and the Golden Globe-winning Glee.