Film

Longtime Companion

Longtime Companion follows a loose circle of gay men and their friends in New York from the first whispered rumors of a mysterious illness in 1981 through the grim decade that followed, told in a handful of unhurried vignettes. It's tender rather than lurid, elegy more than melodrama — plainly shot, patient, devastating in small cumulative moments. Best for anyone wanting the epidemic's early history told through ordinary friendship rather than headline tragedy.

TMDb rating6.7

If you liked this

Philadelphia1993

Tom Hanks won an Oscar playing a lawyer fired for having AIDS, and the courtroom frame makes the disease legible to an audience Longtime Companion never had to convince. It's the mainstream gateway film, warm and openly didactic.

But The legal-drama scaffolding softens some of the rawer edges, and its message-movie earnestness can feel dated next to more intimate portraits.

Philadelphia poster

The Normal Heart2014

Larry Kramer's own furious, autobiographical account of the early activist years, adapted by Ryan Murphy with Mark Ruffalo at full boil. The same history told as a fight rather than a vigil.

But The anger is relentless and the pacing is stagey — it started as a play and still feels like one, all confrontation and speeches.

The Normal Heart poster

How to Survive a Plague2012

Assembled almost entirely from contemporaneous camcorder footage, this documentary puts you inside ACT UP meetings as they happened — the same fear and improvised courage Longtime Companion dramatizes, but unscripted.

But It's activist history, not character drama — dense with names, meetings and legislative detail rather than personal arcs.

How to Survive a Plague poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Silverlake Life: The View from Here1993no page yet

Same city, same years, same community — but shot as an actual home-video diary by a man dying of AIDS with his partner, rather than a scripted account of it.

Unbearably intimate video-diary footage, shot by the couple themselves as one of them dies — the rawest possible version of the exact story Longtime Companion tells with actors and distance.

But There is no fictional cushion here; it is genuinely, unglamorously hard to watch, and some scenes are close to unwatchable in the best and worst sense.

More like this (8)

Angels in America2003

Tony Kushner's sprawling, angel-haunted miniseries widens the lens to Reagan-era politics, Mormon guilt and fever-dream visions, with a cast (Streep, Pacino, Thompson) throwing everything they have at it.

But Six hours long and deliberately theatrical — the magical realism and monologues ask for real patience.

Angels in America poster

Paris Is Burning1991

A documentary shot in the same New York, same years, but among Black and Latino ball culture — joy, invention and chosen family thriving right alongside the crisis Longtime Companion depicts.

But AIDS is present but not the film's stated subject, so if you want the epidemic centred, this will feel like it's talking about something else.

Paris Is Burning poster

And the Band Played On1993

An HBO docudrama tracking scientists, bureaucrats and journalists as they identify the virus and fight the political indifference that let it spread — the institutional half of the story left offscreen here.

But It's procedural and talky, more about labs and press conferences than the friendships at the centre of Longtime Companion.

And the Band Played On poster

Parting Glances1986no page yet

Made while the crisis was still unfolding, this scrappy indie (a very young Steve Buscemi among the cast) captures gay New York life with an ease and humour that Longtime Companion, arriving a few years later, already treats as elegy.

But Low-budget and loosely plotted — a hangout movie more than a drama, which some will find slight.

It's a Sin2021

A British miniseries doing exactly what Longtime Companion does — following a friend group through the plague years — but set in London, brighter-coloured, and angrier at the institutions that failed them.

But It hits some of the same beats you'll have just seen, and its tonal swings between comedy and grief are abrupt.

It's a Sin poster

We Were Here2011no page yet

A quieter documentary of five San Francisco survivors remembering the same decade in their own words — the plainest, least mediated version of what Longtime Companion dramatizes.

But It's talking-heads filmmaking with no reenactment or plot — moving, but not much of a watch in the entertainment sense.

The Seventh Seal1957

A medieval knight playing chess with Death while plague empties the countryside is the same premise stripped of era and politics — people trying to live decently while an unstoppable, unequal death moves through their world.

Ingmar Bergman's black-and-white classic turns plague into philosophy — a knight bargains with Death itself while ordinary people try to find meaning before their number comes up.

But It's a 1957 Swedish art film with subtitles and long theological silences — a completely different pace and vocabulary from anything else here.

The Seventh Seal poster

Night of the Living Dead1968

A group of strangers barricaded together as an unnamed, misunderstood contagion picks them off one by one, while authorities dither and the media gets it wrong — swap zombies for a virus and it's structurally the same nightmare.

Romero's cheap, brutal horror classic is secretly about the same thing: a small group waiting to see who gets taken next by something nobody in charge understands or will name.

But It's a black-and-white horror movie with zero interest in tenderness — if you want the emotional register of Longtime Companion, this will feel cold and violent by comparison.

Night of the Living Dead poster

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Recommended by

An Early Frost, Philadelphia, The Normal Heart, It's a Sin, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, BPM (Beats per Minute), The Last Days of Disco