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10 Queer Movies That Are Perfect From Start to Finish

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The Big Picture

• Art that authentically speaks to marginalized groups is universally impactful.
• Movies with queer characters should tackle important subjects with precision.
• Compelling queer movies like Get Real should be praised for their genuine storytelling.

In divided times, art that speaks to marginalized groups with genuineness is more important than ever. There's a phenomenon that occurs in art (well, good art, anyway) that defies traditional logic and reason, where the more specific and piercing something is, the more universal it becomes. Pandering only reinforces negative stereotypes, if it really has any effect at all, so it's really important to point out and applaud art that really tackles important, delicate subject matter with precision and grace.

These are movies about queer characters that never really misstep, telling authentic stories while never losing sight of what should always, always be the main objectives: to make compelling art, and to entertain. Here are 10 outstanding queer movies that are pretty much flawless from start to finish.

10 'Get Real' (1998)

Directed by simon shore.

Written by Patrick Wilde and directed by Simon Shore , the underrated and wonderful British teen movie Get Real stars Ben Silverstone as a geeky gay teen who has the hots for the school jock ( Brad Gorton ). Turns out the feeling is mutual, leading to a steamy and secretive, often hilarious affair. Get Real is ultimately bittersweet; in the end, both boys are heartbroken, but only one is free.

Hilarious and sad in about equal measure, Get Real was released in a time where such a film had an uphill battle to find an audience; it's a tender coming-of-age romance worth comparing to the greats like Say Anything or The Spectacular Now . Really, all of this is summed up best by Roger Ebert , who suggested in his favorable review that Get Real " might help homophobic teenagers and adults become more accepting of differences. Certainly this film has deeper values than the mainstream teenage comedies that retail aggressive materialism, soft-core sex and shallow ideas about "popularity."

Get Real (1998)

9 'can you ever forgive me' (2018), directed by marielle heller.

To say Melissa McCarthy is often better than the movies she's in is an understatement in the extreme. The two-time Emmy winner, two-time Oscar nominee (the second nod was for this) can cut to the reality and humanity of a situation like nobody else working right now; she's so naturally funny that she should never be in a movie that makes her try to hard at that part. She gives the performance of her career so far in Marielle Heller 's biopic of Lee Israel, a smart but only marginally successful biographer who became best known for literary forgery.

Deeply funny and overflowing with pathos , Can You Ever Forgive Me? captures gay Manhattan of the 1990s perfectly, and was at least for a time, the best movie ever made about the isolation and loneliness that often comes with being a queer adult, earning extra points for playing the reality of the situation (Lee is kind of a jerk, which adds to loneliness generally). Heller followed the genuinely perfect revelation Can You Ever Forgive Me with surprisingly safe Fred Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood , still earning Tom Hanks an Oscar nod.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

*Availability in US

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8 'Love, Simon' (2018)

Directed by greg berlanti.

In Greg Berlanti 's romantic dramedy adaptation of the novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda , Nick Robinson stars as closeted teen, Simon, who's falling in love with another boy at school, only it's over email, so he's not quite sure who it is.

Maybe it's easy to look at something like Love, Simon and be tempted to underestimate it. Doing so would be a grave mistake ; it's admirably performed ( Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel give excellent supporting turns as Simon's parents), funny and true-to-life. Don't underestimate this small-scale but powerful teen film; it really is a film for the ages that's all the more effective for being so accessible and unassuming. It's more than likely the essential coming-out movie. Love, Simon inspired a spinoff series Love, Victor , which is easily one of the best series on Disney+ right now.

Love, Simon (2018)

In the midst of his teenage years, a young man struggles with the decision to come out to his friends and family. His journey of self-discovery becomes even more complicated when he begins an online romance with an anonymous peer who shares his experience, leading to moments of both fear and courage in his quest for acceptance and love.

7 'The Crying Game' (1992)

Directed by neil jordan.

Neil Jordan 's critical and commercial hit, a pitch-perfect political thriller, stars Stephen Rea as Fergus, Irish Republican Army member who unexpectedly falls for the lover ( Jaye Davidson ) of a deceased British soldier killed in the custody of Fergus and his shadier counterparts ( Miranda Richardson and Adrian Dunbar ). The marketing (and even a very famous cryptic Time Magazine review ) hinged upon the film's big twist, which (spoiler alert) is the gender identity of Davidson's Dil. Dazzling, frequently hilarious and Oscar-nominated Davidson, it's worth noting, gives the best performance in an altogether flawless ensemble.

The Crying Game becomes a fathoms-deep kind of love story that transcends all politics , sexual politics or state politics. It's the kind of very special thriller where you find yourself hoping to God that the characters make it out of this alive, even if that seems to defy possibility. In that, the film is exhilarating. The Oscar-winning screenplay is one of the '90s decade.

The Crying Game (1992)

An IRA operative befriends a captured British soldier, leading to unforeseen complications when the soldier dies. The operative relocates to London, searching for the soldier's girlfriend, only to uncover a surprising revelation.

6 'Beach Rats' (2017)

Directed by eliza hittman.

In the movie that made Harris Dickinson a critical darling and a movie star, the English actor plays Frankie, a closeted (or is he just confused?) teen in Long Island with a compartmentalized life: he lives with his family while his father is dying, he has a new girlfriend ( Madeline Weinsten ), and he spends all the time he can on gay hookup sites and using drugs. There's a haunting motif that Hittman and cinematographer Hélène Louvart use throughout the picture, of Frankie staring at himself in a mirror, contorting and covering his face, avoiding actually looking at all of himself, or through his own eyes. Beach Rats isn't a "gay movie." It's a movie about fractured and incomplete identity, and how damaging such a thing can be.

There's a misguided logic that's popped up culture criticism, especially as of late, that suggests movies about people from certain backgrounds or of certain lifestyles should only be told by filmmakers with those experiences, from those histories. Wrong; that's just all wrong. Artists are artists. Eliza Hittman is a terrific filmmaker, and here she's crafted an unforgettable, equal parts erotic and disturbing, testosterone-driven story of coming out. Her next film would be the understated, Oscar-nominated abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always .

5 'My Own Private Idaho' (1991)

Directed by gus van sant.

The career of Gus Van Sant defies logic and reason, and though it's definitely uneven, there are brilliant gems. One of his best features is an inspired early arthouse drama road movie that loosely recounts William Shakespeare's Henry IV , told within the world of Pacific Northwest hustlers in the early '90s. River Phoenix stars, in what's likely his greatest performance, as a narcoleptic prostitute who's determined to find his estranged mom.

Keanu Reeves is effective and well-cast as a handsome, rebellious son of an elected official, but this devastatingly sad, confidently experimental landmark is River Phoenix's movie. The actor died of a drug overdose outside the Viper Room on Halloween night of 1993; re-watching his performance here, it feels like no one could overstate the loss to culture.

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

4 'hedwig and the angry inch' (2001), directed by john cameron mitchell.

Based on John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask 's stage musical of the same, tragicomic Hedwig and the Angry Inch stars Mitchell as an East German rock singer whose band, the Angry Inch, shadows the North American tour of a younger pop star ( Michael Pitt ), and the object of Hedwig's affection, as we learn a complicated backstory of betrayal and clashing cultures alongside the patrons of Hedwig's many Z-list gigs at venues like failing seafood diners.

Cult classic and critical darling Hedwig and the Angry Inch juggles all kinds of complex thematic material through a darkly humorous lens without ever presenting Hedwig as simply a victim. As a musical, Hedwig absolutely rocks. In fact, "Wig in a Box" rocks as hard as anything you've ever heard in a rock show. Mitchell would follow this breakthrough cult classic with Shortbus , a controversial New York City-based drama about relationships that became controversial for unsimulated sex scenes. In 2010, he directed the brutally brilliant family drama Rabbit Hole , which earned Nicole Kidman an Oscar nod.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

3 'brokeback mountain' (2005), directed by ang lee.

Anyone who was alive and cognizant in the mid-aughts will remember Brokeback Mountain for having a genuine, sustained cultural moment; it's a landmark film that's holding up as timeless. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal star as cowboys of the mid-20th century who find forbidden love on a sheep herding gig.

This is an American tragedy, and what makes Brokeback so special is the time and care it takes to break down the tragedy of all of this from every angle , from the perspective of every character involved. Brokeback Mountain was favored to sweep the Oscars, and won 3 including Best Director for Ang Lee . It lost Best Picture to Crash , a movie that seemingly nobody likes these days, in what must be the worst upset in Oscars history.

Brokeback Mountain

Ennis and Jack are two shepherds who develop a sexual and emotional relationship. Their relationship becomes complicated when both of them get married to their respective girlfriends.

2 'Moonlight' (2016)

Directed by barry jenkins.

Though one could easily argue its legacy was overshadowed by what was, for a time, anyway, the most shocking moment in Oscars history, Barry Jenkins neon-hued drama based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue , coming-of-age Moonlight tells the story of young Black, queer Miami man Chiron in three stages of early life, as played by Alex Hibbert , Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes .

Homosexuality isn't the only topic of discussion in Moonlight : it's about American poverty, broken homes, and addiction ( Naomie Harris should have won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for playing Chiron's addicted mother). As the subject matter gets grimmer, the artistry just gets lovelier. It's pure cinema; Moonlight is one of the great films that delivers a fully formed soul to us.

A young African-American man grapples with his identity and sexuality while experiencing the everyday struggles of childhood, adolescence, and burgeoning adulthood.

1 'All of Us Strangers' (2023)

Directed by andrew haigh.

Andrew Haigh has made more than one perfect film, in fact his breakthrough was the critically revered queer landmark Weekend . Multiple critical darlings followed, from 45 Years to Lean on Pete , but his latest is an extraordinary low fantasy with an emotional power that's hard to put to words. Andrew Scott stars as a Londoner who's tying up loose ends with the ghosts of his parents ( Claire Foy and Jamie Bell ) as he romances a mysterious, handsome neighbor ( Paul Mescal ).

This is a romance that works just as effectively as a ghost story , and a meditation on loss. In fact, no other movie in recent memory, perhaps no film since The Babadook , really captures it, the absence of a presence, quite like this. It's a deeply sad film, but sometimes life is deeply sad. Without movies that reflect this without pulling punches or skimping on humanistic discovery, where the hell would we be? This is the best and most strikingly intimate human drama of the decade so far, maybe of the century.

All of Us Strangers

A screenwriter drawn back to his childhood home enters into a fledgling relationship with a mysterious neighbor as he then discovers his parents appear to be living just as they were on the day they died, 30 years before.

NEXT: Romantic Movies That Are Perfect From Start to Finish

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Here Are the 200 Best LGBTQ+ Movies of All Time

Which queer films are the best of the best.

In honor of Pride Month, film and TV review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has released its yearly list of the top 200 best LGBTQ + films of all time, and it is chock-full of excellent queer films that stand the test of time and span almost the past 100 years!

With titles like Love, Simon and Paris Is Burning to Tangerine and Brokeback Mountain , the list has a wide range of genres and moods, but they all have something in common: they all "prominently feature gay, lesbian, trans, or queer characters; concern itself centrally with LGBTQ+ themes; present its LGBTQ+ characters in a fair and realistic light; and/or be seen as a touchpoint in the evolution of queer cinema." And perhaps most importantly, they have to be certified fresh on RT's Tomatometer.

"The final list was culled from a longlist of hundreds, after which the films were ranked according to the Adjusted Tomatometer, which acts as a kind of inflation adjustment, taking into consideration the Tomatometer score, as well as the number of reviews a film received relative to the average number of reviews for films released that same year, " RT said about their process.

"All of these films stand on the shoulders of other LGBTQ+ films that have come before. Our list of the 200 Best LGBTQ+ Movies of All Time stretches back 90 years to the pioneering German film, Madchen in Uniform , which was subsequently banned by the Nazis, and crosses multiple continents, cultures, and genres. There are broad American comedies ( The Birdcage ), artful Korean crime dramas ( The Handmaiden ), groundbreaking indies ( Tangerine ), and landmark documentaries ( Paris Is Burning ). In our latest thorough update to the list, we added titles like the documentary Welcome to Chechnya , about LGBTQ+ activists risking their lives for the cause in Russia; Certified Fresh comedy Shiva, Baby ; and Netflix's The Old Guard , a rare movie about super beings that showed a same-sex relationship between two of its heroes."

Scroll through the top 10 below and make sure to check out Rotten Tomatoes' website for the full list!

10. God's Own Country (2017)

Tomatometer score: 98 percent

9. BPM (Beats Per Minute) (120 Battements Par Minute) (2017)

8. a fantastic woman (una mujer fantástica) (2018).

Tomatometer score: 94 percent

7. Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Tomatometer score: 93 percent

6. The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi) (2016)

Tomatometer score: 95 percent

5. Girls in Uniform (Mädchen in Uniform) (1931)

Tomatometer score: 100 percent

4. Carol (2015)

3. pain and glory (dolor y gloria) (2019).

Tomatometer score: 96 percent

2. Call Me by Your Name (2017)

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The Best Queer Films of 2021, From ‘Parallel Mothers’ to ‘Moffie’

Ryan lattanzio, deputy editor, film.

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While certainly not a given every year, anyone complaining about a lack of good queer films in 2021 simply wasn’t paying attention. While the impending Oscar race may be missing an all-out gay romance such as “Call Me by Your Name,” that doesn’t mean queer cinephiles can’t seek out François Ozon’s sexy and rebellious “Summer of ’85.” For those who prefer their French films on the Sapphic side, not to mentions provocative enough to inspire protests, there was Paul Verhoeven’s dark lesbian nun comedy “Benedetta.” And for campy genre lovers with an eye for fashion, “Spencer” features a wrenchingly tender moment from Sally Hawkins towards Kristen Stewart’s riveting Princess Diana.

Many of this year’s Oscar contenders are enlivened by queer themes , with much more than understated subtext or a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Jane Campion is courting Best Director with her epic deconstructed Western “The Power of the Dog,” and the genre-agnostic animated documentary “Flee” could earn nominations across multiple best film categories. Though Rebecca Hall’s excellent “Passing” didn’t make this list for its subtler approach to queerness, star Tessa Thompson absolutely played it as a queer film . With the Academy’s loyalty to the Spanish auteur, Pedro Almodóvar’s delightful “Parallel Mothers” should easily nab a few nominations.

Though we couldn’t highlight them all, it was an excellent year for trans documentaries, including “Changing the Game,” “My Name Is Pauli Murray,” and “No Ordinary Man.” As these films attempt to build a record from a past that has been violently erased, the genre is adapting in creative ways. Narrative indies with shaggy little budgets also made a big splash this year, such as “The Novice,” “Shiva Baby,” and “Cicada,” which were all recognized with Indie Spirit nominations.

All of the titles mentioned deserve seeking out, but here are the 10 best queer films of 2021.

“Parallel Mothers” (dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

Pedro Almodóvar births his most politically charged film to date with “Parallel Mothers,” an indictment of the horrors of the Francisco Franco regime wrought in personal terms as a switched-at-birth melodrama that sweeps you off your feet and into its lunacy. While you can see where the plot is headed from space, Penélope Cruz and newcomer Milena Smit render the familiar beats as unexpected — their dynamic ever shifting from the maternal to the erotic and back again. (This film is also a reminder of how skilled Almodóvar is at shaping the interpersonal dynamics between women: See the underrated “Julieta” as an example.) 

Together, the two women represent opposite ends of the spectrum of motherhood, but their identities are never fixed in place: At once, Janis (Cruz) is resolute in childless middle-age, and then suddenly welcoming to the possibility of an unexpected child, while Ana (Smit) is a scared teenager staring down the precipice of parenthood. This wildly entertaining movie is drenched in plenty of Almodóvar signatures: (yet again) a sumptuous score from Alberto Iglesias, (yet AGAIN) rich cinematography from José Luis Alcaine, and (YET AGAIN) a brief but potent Rossy de Palma as Janis’ fiery agent. All of the elements coalesce into a swoon-worthy whole, with Almodóvar mic-dropping with surely the most haunting final shot of his entire career to remind that the sins of the past are always inside the present, and that his filmmaking genius is far from done. —RL

“Moffie” (dir. Oliver Hermanus)

There is no more delicious agony than the one felt when you’re sitting millimeters from your crush, wondering who’s going to make the first move, or if someone will at all. That unbearable, painful erotic tension is more or less the sustained mood of Oliver Hermanus’ shimmering and sensual military drama “Moffie,” which is easily the best movie about gay male repression since “God’s Own Country.” Set in 1981 South Africa at the apex of the South African Border War, the film’s story of gay unrequited desire turns out to be a casing for something far more lethal in its marrow.

“Moffie” is Afrikaans slang for “faggot,” and the film, which is based on André Carl van der Merwe’s autobiographical novel of the same name, attempts a bold gesture in reclaiming epithet as an emblem of power. It’s 1981, South Africa, which means it’s not okay to be a “moffie”; effeminacy is a sign of weakness, and being gay is also illegal. It’s also a moment of compulsory military conscription that all (white) boys over the age of 16 must endure, and so that means, as the film begins, Nicholas Van de Swart (Kai Luke Brummer) is readying to ship off to defend colonized land. On its face, the war is between the white minority government and Angola, whose Communism the South African Defense Force wants to stop from spreading; but really, the atrocities as seen inflicted in this movie are governed by the power-seeking regime of Apartheid, and not any real threat.  —RL

“Benedetta” (dir. Paul Verhoeven)

The Dutch provocateur strikes again, this time with a movie that lands somewhere on that vast Verhoeven spectrum between “Elle” and “Showgirls.” Based on a true story of a Renaissance era nun and mystic, “Benedetta” inspired religious protestors to declare it the “blasphemous lesbian nun movie” — further cementing its must-see status. Both an erotic satire and a scathing critique of Catholicism and patriarchy, “Benedetta” is a political farce with a heaping dose of sex appeal. Discovered by the historian Judith C. Brown in the mid-1980s, Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira) was a 17th century mystic who had visions of Christ, claiming he wanted to marry her, and even received the stigmata. She was eventually stripped of her rank and imprisoned due to her sexual relationship with fellow novice Sister Bartolemea (Daphné Patakia).

Verhoeven plays up Benedetta’s flair for the dramatic to deliciously provocative ends, giving her religious embraces the same weight as her lustful longings. It’s never clear, to the more practical Bartolomea nor to the audience, just what Benedetta is playing at or how far her convictions go. Efira, who had a supporting role in “Elle,” is sly and seductive as the fanatc martyr, who dances playfully on the edge or narcissism and impassioned piety. Once she survives being burned at the stake, it’s clear even your craziest ex can’t hold a candle (or Virgin Mary dildo) to Benedetta. —JD

“Summer of 85” (dir. François Ozon)

“Call Me by Your” what now? François Ozon’s sexy, melancholic, gay coming-of-age romance “Summer of 85” sizzles with the hot heat of first love, set against the banks of a seaside resort in Normandy. It’s also got a killer soundtrack including The Cure and Bananarama, pop-colored cinematography, enough Breton shirts to outfit a French New Wave movie, and a cast of easy-on-the-eyes French cinema favorites.

“Summer of 85” channels the talky, beach-set films of Éric Rohmer but with a rebellious edge, hinging on the stolen-hours love affair between introverted teen Alex (Lefebvre) and the slightly older but hardly wiser David (Voisin), the square-jawed adonis who cuts a raffish figure on a motorcycle. The highs and lows of their summer fling collide in a sudden and mysterious tragedy foregrounded in the movie’s opening scenes, which makes the pair’s evolving connection, ignited by the actors’ volcanic chemistry, all the more suspenseful. Adapting Aidan Chambers’ 1982 novel “Dance on My Grave,” Ozon captures the intoxicating pull of first love, and the loss of control that can make a formative erotic bond so dangerous and addictive. The evocative filmmaking is matched by the charms of its leads, who, in case you needed another selling point, enact one of the hottest guy-on-guy kisses ever thrown onscreen. —RL

“The Power of the Dog” (dir. Jane Campion)

Jane Campion’s chiseled almost-Western features Benedict Cumberbatch in a career-high performance as a repressed cattle rancher who likes the smell of his own stink, Jesse Plemons as his more civilized but obviously codependent brother, and Kirsten Dunst as his inward-coiling wife who finally explodes. But the real deal in “The Power of the Dog” is the promise of Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee as Peter, Dunst’s lithe and otherworldly son whose gimlet eyes conceal wells of mystery, pain, and rage. Draped across this tapestry of fine actors is Ari Wegner’s sinister vision of 1920s Montana.

It comes as no surprise that Campion — the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind such movies as “The Piano” and “In the Cut,” and TV series including “Top of the Lake” — could turn out another masterful flaying of the masculine ego, and the flickering feminine inside of it. Going straight back to Thomas Savage’s 1967 source novel, Campion threads the needle between queer repression, desire, and violence. A psychosexual current starts to vibrate between Smit-McPhee and Cumberbatch, who wears his cowboy ego like a costume that starts to shed in Peter’s hands. It’s possible to read “The Power of the Dog” as a kind of acid-dipped love story, thanks to the queer sensibilities of its filmmaker, who uses her portent-filled approach to visually and aurally articulate the desires her emotionally sheltered protagonists can’t. —RL

“Flee” (dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen)

An inspired mix of genres allows this gripping animated documentary to transcend its wrenching story, offering intimate access to a story so personal and dangerous that its subject has never uttered a word of it before. The subject is Amin Nawabi, a Danish-Afghani man who arrived in Denmark 20 years ago as a child refugee. For the first time in his life, he tells his real story to his best friend, Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen, who listens openly from behind the camera. The film is seen mostly through rotoscope animation, a technique where animators trace over video footage, creating a simple but effective 2D appearance. The animation not only protects Amin’s identity, but easily transports the viewers through Amin’s harrowing journey from his childhood in Kabul to his family’s purgatory in Russia, and his eventual arrival in Copenhagen.

Rasmussen breaks up the story with Amin’s present day struggles, showing how Amin’s past is affecting his relationship with his Danish fiancé Kasper. Kasper wants to buy a house and move to the country, while Amin chases professional opportunities abroad, hoping success will ease the guilt of the sacrifices his family made for him. It’s the kind of contemporary relationship issue that would be too subtle for a narrative film, but makes perfect sense as a real life conflict. In their highest form, documentaries can reveal humanity far more effectively than a written script ever could. “Flee” hits all those notes, and then some. —JD

“Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F***er” (dir. Chris McKim)

The artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992, used his queerness as a radical pose, a way of saying, as Chris McKim’s documentary “Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F***er” notes, “I’m not gay as in I love you, I’m queer as in fuck off.” An angry, traumatized painter, photographer, writer, musician, filmmaker, and activist, Wojnarowicz cut a striking figure: wiry, gaunt, sallow-faced. In other words, he didn’t exactly blend into the world, and so he idolized fellow rebel poets like Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet, outcasts who allowed him to see the falsities of straight society from the outside. Blending Wojnarowicz’s own audio journals with input from a handful of his contemporaries, Chris McKim’s startling and meticulously edited movie captures the spirit of the artist as he was, bracing and in-your-face.

Filmmaker McKim accesses an immense trove of exclusive material to tell the Wojnarowicz story, including answering machine tape recordings that reveal the many storms of his mind. His deteriorating, downward spiral as AIDS took a grip on his body and soul is cast in scary relief. “F**k You F*ggot F***er” is a constantly moving collage, a locomotive piece propelling toward a bleak end — Wojnarowicz’s death. In his experimental approach to the material, director McKim shows he has as much of a rebellious streak as his inspiration.  —RL

“Little Girl” (dir. Sébastien Lifshitz)

There’s no rule that a great documentary should imitate narrative film, but it’s impressive when one manages to skirt the line so delicately that the viewer has no idea what they’ve been watching until the credits roll. That’s the experience with “Little Girl,” Sébastien Lifshitz’s luminous portrayal of a seven-year-old trans girl living in Northeastern France. Shot primarily at her eye level, “Little Girl” takes you straight to the heart of the trans child’s experience, seeing through her eyes the dogged support of her indefatigable mother and loving family.

Lifshitz shoots Sasha in golden-hued close-up, her feathery chestnut bob falling around her cherubic face. If little Sasha is the soul of the film, her mother Karine is its unwavering heart; driving the film to the steady rhythm of unconditional love and tenderness. Like a protective cocoon, her parents and three siblings unite around Sasha. Though the family’s struggles provide the core narrative, there are moments of levity amidst the sorrow, and “Little Girl” is ultimately ends on a high note. —JD

“Boy Meets Boy” (dir. Daniel Sanchez Lopez)

A modern-day spin on the walking-and-talking “Before Sunrise” formula set in Berlin, “Boy Meets Boy” enjoyed a rich run on the festival circuit (and finally hit streaming from Ariztical back in October). Daniel Sanchez Lopez’s sweaty, sexy, drug-filled romance follows British man Harry (Matthew James Morrison) who, after 48 hours of wild partying and app-happy hookups, sparks with local Berliner Johannes (Alexandros Koutsoulis). They philander around the city over the course of 15 hours, and as with the best “Before” movies, the ticking clock hanging overhead because of Harry’s impending flight back to the UK makes for lump-in-the-chest suspense. Their values are put to the test — Harry’s rejection of love in favor of anonymous sex in collision with Johannes’ preference for monogamy and stability zeroes in on a binary painfully recognizable to any queer person. Not to be missed for fans of “Weekend.”  —RL

“After Blue” (dir. Bertrand Mandico)

Set on a fantasy planet where only women can survive the harsh climate, Bertrand Mandico’s seductive, ethereal, and bizarre epic “After Blue” — aptly subtitled “Dirty Paradise” — is the rare avant-garde film that is wildly entertaining. The adventure follows a mother and daughter on a grueling journey to find and kill the evil “Kate Bush,” rumored to be death herself. One part “Annihilation” and one part “The Love Witch,” with a sadistic “The NeverEnding Story” streak, the film creates a lush — sometimes grotesque — alternate universe ruled by unique rules, creatures, and longings. Love it or hate it, you’ve never seen anything quite like “After Blue.”

The cockeyed invention hails from queer French filmmaker Mandico, whose singular style first wowed in his debut feature “The Wild Boys,” which also featured a cast of all women. He is part of a new wave of queer French filmmakers, including his frequent collaborator Yann Gonzalez (“Knife + Heart”), who are breathing fresh life into genre, all with an added flare for the fantastical. In his role as maestro, Mandico has assembled all the requisite elements and players to form a wholly original cinematic world. A kaleidoscopic fantasy warped through the lens of a 1970s sci-fi Western, “After Blue” is a synthetic siren song for the freaks of the future and the past. —JD

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17 Essential LGBTQ Movies You Should Watch Right Now

By paul schrodt | oct 23, 2023, 8:46 am edt.

It’s one very weird Pride Month we’re living through in 2020. While marching in a muscle tank is out, as with many things during the coronavirus pandemic , there are slivers of opportunity. To that end, what better way to celebrate all that is queer than with a headfirst dive into the incredibly rich history of LGBTQ movies from the comfort of your couch?

Queer cinema—or as it was endearingly branded in the ‘90s, New Queer Cinema ( the ‘90s were extremely gay for independent film)—has afforded directors of all sexual identities and orientations all over the world an opportunity to showcase distinctive, nuanced, personal stories of what it means to be a member of the LGBTQ community. Fortunately, in recent years, we’ve also seen more of this work from Black American filmmakers like Dee Rees ( Bessie , Mudbound ) coming to public view.

These movies aren’t necessarily the definitive queer movies, nor are they the most popular. But they represent an idiosyncratic, undeniably off-kilter, sometimes fabulous, and always fully realized vision of what it means to feel slightly apart from the straights. (Though the straights are most definitely welcome to the party.)

1. Far from Heaven (2002)

This whole list could easily be dedicated solely to Todd Haynes—the towering director behind queer movies from the ‘90s on. But with all apologies to the great Carol (2015) and Safe (1995), we need to keep things concise. Haynes's best film, Far from Heaven , may not appear queer at first, but the slick update of mid-century melodramas then known as "women’s pictures" masterfully queers up its source material. Cathy (Julianne Moore) is a love-deprived housewife flirting with her Black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), while her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) is a suit with a closeted affection for men. But everyone here is painfully inching their way to a full expression of their sexual and romantic selves—something any LGBTQ person knows well.

Watch it: Amazon, iTunes, Starz, YouTube

2. Nowhere (1997)

Director Gregg Araki ( Mysterious Skin ) has sadly never received the mainstream attention he deserves, but Nowhere remains a singular insight into his so-called Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy (which also includes 1993's Totally F***ed Up and 1995's The Doom Generation ). The film, which follows an assorted mix of adrift LA youth of different colors and orientations who are connected by their disaffection, is by turns funny, surreal, and tragic—often in the same scene.

Watch it: DVD

3. Laurence Anyways (2012)

In more recent years, we’ve gotten fresh cinematic portraits of trans life. Laurence Anyways from French-Canadian indie darling Xavier Dolan is on the florid side, as with all of Dolan's films, but it’s oh so pretty. He films the blossoming of a trans woman in a difficult relationship like a glossy music video simmering with heartbreak.

Watch it: Amazon Prime

4. Happy Together (1997)

If you haven’t dabbled in Chinese cinema, here’s a gorgeous place to start. Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai—who won a BAFTA for 2000's In the Mood for Love —trains his eye on two men feeling the heady push and pull of mutual lust and dissatisfaction. The photography alone, from noisy urban Hong Kong streets to the swirling waterfalls of Buenos Aires, is swoon-worthy.

Watch it: The Criterion Channel

5. Bad Education (2004)

After a three-year break from directing, Oscar-winning Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar came back into the spotlight in 2019 with his semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory . But his criminally underrated Bad Education touches on gay youth and abuse in fascinating, brutally straightforward fashion. It might be the best performance of Gael García Bernal’s career.

Watch it: Amazon, iTunes, YouTube

6. In a Year with 13 Moons (1978)

Watch this movie only if you’re up for a profoundly disturbing (but beautifully rendered!) experience. German filmmaking legend Rainer Werner Fassbinder is at his most stark here, unraveling the tale of a trans woman taking account of lost love and her current identity. Hard as it is to watch, it’s a vital window into the still all-too-real problems and violence the trans community faces.

Watch it: Amazon Prime, The Criterion Channel

7. My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Gus Van Sant is in some ways the most accessible LGBTQ filmmaker. But long before the overlong and overrated Harvey Milk biopic Milk , he delivered a rollicking punch in My Own Private Idaho . Though the film is structurally fractured and utilizes pretty much every filmic tool in the toolbox—including a bonkers Shakespearean interlude, documentary-style interviews, and yes, Flea—it somehow all hangs together thanks to the poignant performances of River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves as hustlers who are desperate to find something like home.

8. Trash (1970)

Did you know Andy Warhol made movies? Shaggy and frequently ridiculous, they’re also sometimes stunning. Case in point: This very low-budget, all-the-way-in-your-face take (directed by Paul Morrissey) on a heroin addict and his trans girlfriend (a hilariously shrieking Holly Woodlawn) who will do anything to get by in a rough, anything-goes New York City.

9. Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)

It’s perhaps less than an authentic portrayal of first lesbian love, but Cannes winner Blue Is the Warmest Color works so well because the beats of a fluttering romance turned hurtful are universal.

Watch it: Netflix

10. Paris Is Burning (1990)

At the time it came out, Paris Is Burning was a surprising commercial success and a curiosity. Director Jennie Livingston spent careful time observing the world of Harlem-based voguing balls (which inspired Madonna’s hit “Vogue”) and the wildly talented, frequently catty, fabulous but downtrodden dancers who inhabited them. That many of those performers have died from HIV/AIDS complications makes it that much more essential a document.

Watch it: DVD or Blu-ray

11. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

It’s no surprise that Hedwig and the Angry Inch has become a Broadway hit. What began as an Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway musical in 1998 spawned this indie phenom movie—directed by John Cameron Mitchell, who also stars—then made its way back to the stage via Broadway, where it won four Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical. In all its incarnations, Hedwig has a killer soundtrack surrounding the unapologetically messy trans woman at its center (and yes, she has an angry inch). She tears down borders like a broken Berlin Wall.

Watch it: HBO Max

12. Bound (1996)

The Matrix -famous Wachowskis were way ahead of their time with this tight, noirish crime thriller in which Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon can’t resist each other in a mob-filled Art Deco apartment building. This cannot be overstated: It’s very hot.

13. Moonlight (2016)

Barry Jenkins's Moonlight , which won the 2017 Oscar for Best Picture, doesn’t need more of the standard praise, so I’ll say this: I grew up in a more affluent Miami neighborhood, but the depiction of two Black boys in the city’s impoverished Liberty City fumbling their way to understanding their sexuality as they’re marginalized by the outside world felt so real when I first watched it in theaters. The beach scene is magical. When the two reconnect as men over a homemade Cuban meal—my hometown’s sign of love—I was flooded with tears. More importantly, those tears were earned.

14. Pariah (2011)

By the very title, you know that the protagonist of Dee Rees’s ( Mudbound ) delicately told portrait focuses on an outsider. Alike (Adepero Oduye) is a teenage girl struggling with her lesbian desires and the expectations and conflict in her family, yet she is no standard coming-of-age heroine. Oduye is so self-possessed in her portrayal, it’s impossible to look away.

15. Tangerine (2015)

This low-tech black comedy from Sean Baker ( The Florida Project ) doesn’t look like it was shot on an iPhone, but it was. Tangerine is a bleary, saturated fever dream that touches on corners of trans prostitution in L.A., but it also illuminates the deep abiding hope of people who just want to be recognized as the humans they are.

Watch it: Hulu

16. The Crying Game (1992)

If you lived through the ‘90s, you probably know the shot: the mid-film reveal. But while too many of us focused on the sexual dynamics of The Crying Game , Neil Jordan’s masterwork sensitively weaves a queer romance into a tapestry covering fascinating corners of Irish life.

Watch it: Netflix, Showtime

17. The Birdcage (1996)

I have to get personal: The Birdcage was the first LGBTQ movie I saw in theaters as a kid. I was floored. It’s hilarious. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane make an idiosyncratic but believable gay South Beach couple who also happen to own a drag club. And who have to convince a conservative couple that they are, in fact, a straight couple. The movie might seem dated now, but it was massively empowering in its time. When my dad took me and my brother out of the theater, he was clear: “That was funny, but there’s nothing funny about being gay. Gay people are just like everyone else.” The conversation reverberated as I came out years later.

Watch it: Showtime

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(Photo by Netflix. Thumbnail image: Focus/courtesy Everett Collection)

The 30 Best LGBTQ Movies on Netflix Right Now

In celebration of Pride month, we compiled a list of the best Fresh lesbian, gay, trans, and queer films you can watch on Netflix right now. You’ll find Netflix originals (like recent documentaries  Circle of Books  and  A Secret Love ) as well as award-winning theatrical releases.

The titles below are sorted from the best LGBTQ films on Netflix and ranked by adjusted Tomatometer score (which takes into account the number of reviewers weighing in, and the number of reviews per film for movies released in a given year). To be included, films had to have a Fresh Tomatometer score (60% or above).

The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin (2017) 92%

Transformer (2017) 100%

I Am Michael (2015) 62%

The Danish Girl (2015) 66%

The Perfection (2018) 70%

Edge of Seventeen (1998) 80%

Alex Strangelove (2018) 81%

Holding the Man (2015) 81%

Let It Snow (2019) 81%

Lovesong (2016) 83%

Handsome Devil (2016) 84%

What Keeps You Alive (2018) 80%

The Boys in the Band (2020) 84%

Other People (2016) 85%

Girl (2018) 84%

I Care a Lot (2020) 79%

Lingua Franca (2019) 87%

A Single Man (2009) 86%

Straight Up (2019) 93%

Brokeback Mountain (2005) 88%

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017) 97%

I Am Divine (2012) 96%

The Queen (1968) 96%

Pariah (2011) 95%

Disclosure (2020) 98%

Circus of Books (2019) 98%

The Half of It (2020) 97%

A Secret Love (2020) 100%

Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado (2020) 100%

Milk (2008) 93%

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The 2021 Queer Film Review

By Hamish Calvert

It’s important that at the end of another twelve months of movies we pause to reflect, critique, and celebrate all that the queer cinematic year had to offer. 

There were plenty of directorial debuts in 2021; Daniel Sanchez Lopez brought us Boy Meets Boy ––feeling like a chapter in an alternative gay Before trilogy, and Marley Morrison took us on a queer holiday, in the well-received drama, Sweetheart . However, in one of the most memorable debuts of the year, Samuel Van Grinsven delivered both a coming of age story and a thriller for the Grindr generation in the provocative Sequin in a Blue Room . The film was incredibly reflective of modern gay hook-up culture, leaning into the positive and negative aspects associated with it. This up-to-date approach proved that Grinsven is a new—and more importantly—enlightened voice in queer cinema and one that will have audiences hotly anticipating his future work.  

Whilst younger gay men are often the predominant focus of queer cinema, Harry Macqueen’s sophomore film, tender drama Supernova gave some much-needed representation to older gay men. Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci starred as a long-term couple, Sam and Tusker, who travel to the Lake District as Tusker’s dementia progressively worsens. Macqueen’s touching story of love and loss was a hit with both audiences and critics and poignantly contributed towards the variety of gay men that cinema puts front and center. 

Moving even further into the mainstream, the stage show adaptation Everybody’s Talking About Jamie was released onto Amazon Prime in September. Whilst on paper it sounded like a fabulous drag queen musical set to add some sparkle to screens, the film was surprisingly melancholic and unfortunately over-long. Despite this, it seemed to connect with a lot of viewers and it’s reassuring to see studios investing in productions like this. 

More recently Netflix have enjoyed success with their first-ever gay Christmas rom-com, Single All the Way . It’s not going to be topping any “Best Christmas Movies of All Time” lists but nonetheless it was a refreshing take on the queer festive film that thankfully avoided the tired coming out cliché. Also available on Netflix, although of an entirely different style, was Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, which saw Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst starring in a western that explored toxic masculinity and repressed sexuality. Whilst her film might be somewhat of an acquired taste for casual film fans it was a huge hit with critics and is set to sweep this year’s awards season––apparently, Netflix is versatile?

Some further viewing from female directors that also featured members of the LGBTQ+ community other than gay men, and that were maybe not seen by as many include; The World to Come , Tove , Titane, Shiva Baby, and Cowboys . Shiva Baby was another feature film debut, this time from Emma Seligman whose film followed Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a young bisexual , Jewish woman who reluctantly attends a shiva with her family, with some hilarious and equally anxiety-inducing results. Whereas, Anna Kerrigan wrote and directed Cowboys , an important story about a young trans boy, Joe (Sasha Knight) and his Father, Troy (Steve Zahn) who attempt to evade police capture after Troy removes Joe from a dangerous domestic situation.

2021 also saw a wide range of queer documentaries released, covering an interesting collection of subjects. Stacey Lee’s Underplayed explored the gender inequality in the EDM (electronic dance music) industry. Her fascinating film gave insights into the origins of EDM and explained in a striking way how the inequality in this industry only increases when further aspects such as race and sexuality are also considered. 

Eammon Ashton-Atkinson told the story of the world’s first gay rugby team in Steelers . His film delivered far more than simple sporting coverage though, gathering captivating testimony from players and coaches about the various stigmas and challenges that come with being queer in sports. However, Steelers wasn’t the only documentary to discuss sports this year as excellent Hulu documentary, Changing the Game covered the important conversation of discrimination against transgender athletes. The discussion was led by three teenage athletes with direct experience of this––trans people included in talking about trans issues, imagine!

In August, Netflix released Pray Away, which exposed the cruel and harmful practice of conversion therapy. Whilst many countries are in the midst of fighting for a legislative ban on the practice this proved to be a timely release that supported the conversation. However, it fell short of its vast potential, only scratching the surface of the issue and failing to shine its spotlight on the people most affected by this abuse. 

Otherwise, documentaries Rebel Dykes and Mothers of the Revolution both explored the Greenham Common protests against nuclear weapons being homed on English soil, as well as the subsequent queer communities that came together as a result. Both were celebrations of what queer women achieved, and celebrated their culture and communities that had often been misunderstood and unfairly treated.

Beyond these queer titles and documentaries mainstream cinema has also seen some great representation. Unsurprisingly the horror genre was one of the best when it came to including queer characters. Horror has always enjoyed a close relationship with queerness and this year was no different. Sequels like Candyman and Halloween Kills featured underrepresented groups of gay men in happy relationships. The former saw Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and Kyle Kaminsky as a queer couple and––spoilers––in somewhat of a revelation for the genre, they didn’t die. This very trope, of gays being killed in horror films, was brilliantly referenced in Christopher Landon’s camp body-swap slasher, Freaky. One of his characters, Josh Detmer played by non-binary star Micha Osherovich, gave audiences a wonderfully self-aware moment of comedy in the process. Whilst US audiences enjoyed Freaky at the end of 2020, UK audiences had to wait all the way until July to get in on the slasher action. 

One title that audiences got to enjoy simultaneously was Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street trilogy , the first chapter of which was released onto Netflix in July. It showcased progressive writing by having two main queer characters. So often queer people are seen as minor or secondary characters only, so to have a trilogy of widely accessible films have two queer characters at its forefront was a massive step forward in queer representation. 

Another example of this was seen in Chloé Zhao’s Eternals which featured Brian Tyree Henry’s Phastos , the very first gay superhero to appear in an MCU film. Whilst he was a supporting character it was great to see him as part of a happy family with children. This was a much better example than the so-called representation in Avengers: Endgame . It would appear Marvel is finally learning––it only took them twenty-six movies. Although this wasn’t the only film with mass appeal that made clear the queerness of their characters. In No Time to Die, Daniel Craig’s final outing as superspy James Bond, it was confirmed that Ben Whishaw’s Q is queer. Bond and Moneypenny barge in on him at home in the midst of him preparing to entertain a love interest on a date and it’s revealed Q is waiting on a he. 

However, the most family-friendly of all the 2021 releases to do this has to be The Mitchells Vs. the Machines . To have main character Katie, voiced by Abbi Jacobson be queer is the progression that is needed in family films like this, and sets a great example of how to include LGBTQ+ characters in movies that families will watch together––more of this please.

Looking forward though, what queer titles should we be anticipating? Well, although it was released in the US in December, the animated documentary Flee will be released in many other countries, including the UK in 2022. This stunning piece of cinema tells the story of Amin, a queer refugee who escaped conflict in Afghanistan as a child. It’s the definition of a must-see and is set to be a favourite this awards season. Another that’s hoping for some awards attention is the official Austrian selection for Best International Feature Film Oscar, Great Freedom . This prison drama offers an emotional exploration on fragile masculinity and queer intimacy whilst remembering a whole generation of men, imprisoned simply for being themselves. The film will be released at the beginning of March next year and will hopefully be a highlight in another year of quality queer filmmaking. ♦

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Movie Lists

The 30 Best Queer Movies of All Time

If you follow me on Letterboxd , you probably noticed my creation of The Queer Canon , a list dedicated to chronicling and ranking all of the queer films I’ve watched. For pride month, I wanted to bring that to this site in long form for the second year in a row. Since it is just me creating this list, it is obviously subject to my own bias as a white sapphic person!

This year’s list has 30 movies (up from 15 last year) out of the 60 total queer films I’ve watched. Of these, there is sadly only one non-English language movie on the list, but I plan on trying to watch more for 2025’s list. Unfortunately the few that I have watched over the past year were just not that good!

If I’m missing your favorite, let us know in the comments!

30. The Color Purple (2023)

Director: Blitz Bazawule

Release Date: 2023

Find the Movie: Letterboxd

The first time this movie was adapted, the queerness was completely erased from the narrative. The second time, the relationship between the two main women was made explicit. The Color Purple is a powerful story about struggling to survive and the power of relationships between women.

29. Juniper

Director: Katherine Dudas

Release Date: 2021

After her sister dies, a college aged girl goes to her family’s cabin to grieve. Unfortunately for her (and fortunately for the audience) her friends show up as well, ostensibly for “comfort”. What follows is a 90 minute film that takes us deeply into the lives of a friend group where everyone is gay and secrets abound. This film is far more indie than most of the others on the list, and the humor and style aren’t for everyone, but I deeply enjoyed it.

Director: Sammi Cohen

Release Date: 2022

Find the Movie: Letterboxd | Review

Starting the list off strong with a high school era enemies to lovers tale that truly does it like nobody else! And by nobody else, I mean there were rumors that the cast really did hate each other, which only added to the allure of the film itself. Purely judging based off what is onscreen, these are two talented young actors giving an incredible and oftentimes laugh out loud performance.

27. Single All the Way

Director: Michael Mayer

I absolutely adore this movie, and it has quickly moved to a yearly re-watch type of film. It’s a classic—a happy friendship duo head to one of their family’s homes for Christmas, and hijinks ensue as they are pushed together (and apart) by their family. It brought me so much happiness!

26. Girl, Interrupted

Director: James Mangold

Release Date: 1999

While I absolutely adored Angelina Jolie in this film, the relative lack of explicit queerness on-screen dropped this movie to 9th place. Most of this movie takes place at a mental institution where the main characters are living, so I’d add a strong trigger warning for mental illness—and 1960’s care practices. If you’re a fan of queer undertones and movies that center lesbian characters with lots of odd yearning that pays off in a single kiss, this movie is for you.

25. Challengers

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Release Date: 2024

Challengers is a gay movie and I refuse to believe otherwise. The boys are in love, and there is more than just subtext to back that up. That being said, I did rank it this low because of the ratio of subtext to genuine queerness and the fact that 1/3 of the characters are definitely straight and only 1/3 of the characters are definitely bi. If you’re looking for a super fucking hot movie about bisexuals who love each other and tennis, go watch Challengers .

24. Disobedience

Director: Sebastián Lelio

Release Date: 2017

If you’ve heard of this film, it’s probably because of the famous “spit” scene where one actress named Rachel spits into the mouth of another actress named Rachel. This scene is hot, yes, especially if you’re willing to watch the incredibly long period of yearning to hit this point. It seems that far too many lesbian movies are essentially about unfulfilled desire, and this one is no different.

23. Bodies Bodies Bodies

Director: Halina Reijn

Find the Movie : Letterboxd

This movie was so incredibly good. The horror was well-played, with just enough suspense to keep me on the edge of my seat. While the friend group was criminally unhinged, this was such a great cast that they managed to pull it off. Amandla Stenberg and Rachel Sennott are such talented actors, and I’m fully planning a binge to watch everything they’ve ever been in.

22. Booksmart

Director: Olivia Wilde

Release Date: 2019

Booksmart was well crafted from start to finish. This coming-of-age story wasn’t explicitly focused on romance, but the strength of the friendship between the two main characters was potentially more poignant. This will forever be a classic for straight and queer people alike, and is well worth the watch if you haven’t seen it already.

21. Everything Everywhere All at Once

Director: Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan

Everything Everywhere All at Once is ranked lower because the queerness is not the central focus of the movie nor the identity of the main character. However, one of the side characters (who gets significant screen-time) is a lesbian, and during one of the many time periods, the main character is as well. In my opinion, that’s enough to consider it queer.

Director: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin

NYAD is the powerful true story of the lesbian long distance swimmer who was determined to do what nobody had ever done before. Well into her 50s, Nyad trained and struggled to accomplish her life’s goal. What’s so great about this movie is the display of queer friendship and chosen family.

19. D.E.B.S.

Director: Angela Robinson

Release Date: 2004

In this classic lesbian movie, a group of girls work for a secret undercover spy group. It’s all fun and games until one of them falls in love with the enemy and they end up running off together. As you could probably guess, D.E.B.S. is incredibly camp and incredibly funny.

18. Theater Camp

Director: Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman

Theater is inherently queer, and that was brought to the forefront in Theater Camp . While only one of the two main characters were explicitly gay, there was enough LGBTQ+ content in this to make it deserve its place on the list. When a theater camp is in danger of shutting down, two campers-turned-counselors do everything in their power to save it.

17. Vita & Virginia

Director: Chanya Button

Release Date: 2018

I am not a big fan of period pieces, but I did enjoy this one. Vita & Virginia is deeply sapphic and filled with all of the longing you would expect out of a movie where women are forced to wear dresses and corsets.

16. Blue Jean

Director: Georgia Oakley

While this movie isn’t exactly “feel good”, it is one of my favorite movies. Set in the UK during a recent period of homosexual backlash, Jean must figure out who she wants to be and what she wants to show to the world. Fearful of losing her job if people find out she’s queer, the physical education teacher ends up hurting one of her (also queer) students on her journey to finding herself.

15. Love Lies Bleeding

Director: Rose Glass

Love Lies Bleeding is Kristen Stewart’s dramatic romance filled with steroids, criminal enterprise, and toxic relationships. I love when there’s queer romances that don’t center around the people being queer—the fact that they were lesbians felt mostly irrelevant to the plot as a whole while still feeling authentically gay. This movie was gruesome and not for the faint of heart, but the romance and sex was hot nonetheless.

14. Shiva Baby

Director: Emma Seligman

Release Date: 2020

If you’re okay with watching a movie that will make you anxious the entire time, go watch Shiva Baby . This film was incredibly anxiety inducing, but it worked to capture the headspace of our main character as she navigates a Shiva in the presence of her family, her sugar daddy, and her ex-girlfriend. Spicy!

13. Loving Annabelle

Director: Katherine Brooks

Release Date: 2006

I know this movie is controversial! Teachers and students should not date! That being said, this movie does have a place in the lesbian canon both because of what an enjoyable watch it is and because of when it came out. A Catholic teacher has to handle coming out both to herself and other people while her student, Annabelle, is confidently queer.

12. The Half of It

Director: Alice Wu

I know I’m not alone in hoping that The Half of It eventually gets a sequel. This was such a heartwarming teen movie about a girl who’s deeply and impossibly in love with another girl. Anyone who’s had an unrequited high school crush will relate to the emotions that Leah Lewis portrays through her character, Ellie. It’s part of the quintessential queer kid experience.

11. Happiest Season

Director: Clea DuVall

Widely criticized for having one of the most insufferable love interests of all time, Happiest Season is a mainstream lesbian entry into the Christmas romance genre directed by a true lesbian icon. Kristen Stewart and Aubrey Plaza star in this lighthearted film about coming out to your family and finding ways to celebrate the holidays in a somewhat dysfunctional (yet ultimately loving) environment. Did I mention that Aubrey Plaza is an incredibly hot lesbian?

10. Do Revenge

Director: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

While I wasn’t initially expecting much from this Netflix original, I absolutely adored it. It was such a hilarious return comedic content and romance. There was drama, scandal, and more. High school movie fans will love this, and even if it’s not your normal cup of tea, the plot twists and betrayal will have you on the edge of your seat the entire time.

9. The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Director: Desiree Akhavan

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is just so good. While it takes place at a conversion camp, the emotion and love is so beautifully displayed in this adaption of the book by the same name. I still haven’t read the book but I love the movie so much.

8. Edge of Seventeen

Director: David Moreton

Release Date: 1998

Not to be confused with the much more recent Edge of Seventeen (2016) starring Hailee Steinfeld, this coming of age movie is about coming out, but it’s also about finding yourself. It was delightful and emotionally gut wrenching all at the same time. Plus, I’m living for Eric’s style evolution over the course of the two hours. This is the type of movie that leaves you crying and screaming at the screen while simultaneously understanding each character’s actions.

7. Saving Face

Part of what made this movie so fun was the fact that we got a romantic story from both mother and daughter. A Chinese-American woman is dealing with her forbidden romance at the same time her mother is secretly dating someone herself. This movie was so funny while being emotionally resonant at the same time.

6. But I’m a Cheerleader

Director: Jamie Babbit

This is potentially the most well-known lesbian movie of all time, at least among lesbians. Featuring absolute icons Clea Duvall, Natasha Lyonne, and Melanie Lynskey, this campy conversion camp classic is an absolute must watch for a mix of comedy and tears.

Director: Todd Haynes

Release Date: 2015

I finally got around to watching Carol , and now it’s near the top of this list. In the 1950s, a department-store clerk falls in love with an older woman who desperately wants to escape her current life. Even as someone who doesn’t love period pieces, this one was sexy and fun and there was enough true romance to back up the yearning.

Bottoms is an incredibly camp high school comedy about two best friends, Josie and PJ, who start a fight club to attract girls. There’s absolutely no realism in this movie, so don’t expect it, but there are cute romantic arcs and an adorable lesbian best friendship.

3. Housekeeping for Beginners

Director: Goran Stolevski

I had no idea what to expect when I saw this movie in theaters, but it exceeded all of my expectations. When Dita’s girlfriend dies, she finds herself raising her girlfriend’s two daughters, and managing the community space that they house had become. This Macedonian film was a beautiful story of found family that left me crying at multiple points.

2. Imagine Me & You

Director: Ol Parker

Release Date: 2005

If you’re a fan of classic early aughts rom-coms, then you’ll absolutely love Imagine Me & You . It’s built to that model, but with a lesbian twist! I was yelling screaming and cheering for the protagonists to succeed throughout the entirety of the film. Plus, the chemistry between the leads is incredible!

1. Fire Island

Director: Andrew Ahn

This was one of my favorite movies of last year, and with good reason. Fire Island is based on Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice , but centering a cast of gay Asian men on their annual trip to Fire Island. Enemies to lovers is a soft spot of mine, but what really made this movie great was the friendships between the main characters and the conversations they had that made them feel real. It’s hard to be funny and deep at the same time, but this cast pulled it off!

What are your favorite queer movies?

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The 26 Greatest Queer Movies You Didn't Realize Were Queer

The whole point of Pride Month is that LGBTQIA+ folks have a publicly acknowledged window in which they can loudly and proudly honor their history, and celebrate themselves, their community, and their identities. But not all queer folks have that luxury. Many people have to hide their true selves, either because it's the only way they can remain safe or because they're simply not ready to come out to the world yet. And while there are plenty of queer movies out there, especially in the underground and independent scenes, cinema has largely existed in the closet. Most movies can only be gay in secret, slyly revealing non-heteronormative intentions via sly lines of dialogue and subtext intended for a certain audience (if you know, you know).

So it's time to celebrate those movies. The queer movies that aren't always so explicit about their queerness, the LGBTQIA+ movies that are peeking out from the closet. Some of them are fully aware of their identities, and are just playing coy. Others are just so clearly gay, but haven't come to terms with it yet. But if you're programming a Pride Month marathon, you can't go wrong with these delicious, funny, scary, moving, ridiculous, and powerful films.

Happy Pride. Go watch a queer movie. Start with these. 

2 Fast 2 Furious is a masculine love story

The "Fast and Furious" movies are all about machismo and emotional bonding, but John Singleton's often under-appreciated "2 Fast 2 Furious" is the one where the subtext flies off the screen. The film stars Paul Walker as Brian, an ex-cop who's in trouble for letting the criminal he bonded with in the first film go, and who must once again go undercover as a street racer to clear his record.

This time he's teaming up with Roman (Tyrese Gibson), who turns out to be the very reason why Brian has such powerful relationships with troubled men, and is willing to risk everything for them. Roman blames Brian for his own arrest, and now Brian is ready to make amends. So they scuffle on the ground, they bicker about blouses, and they run into more trouble when Brian starts falling for another undercover agent, Monica (Eva Mendez). Roman spends the majority of the film chastising Brian for being romantically interested in women, and shows nearly no interest in them himself.

To watch "2 Fast 2 Furious" is to watch a bromance with the letter "b" only barely visible. Singleton's approach to male intimacy is more intimate than the other filmmakers in the "Fast" saga, building meaningful bonds via queer energy, even if the characters never explicitly admit to their feelings. (William Bibbiani)

The Batman is a romance between a bisexual woman and an asexual man

The word "bisexual" is never used in Matt Reeves' "The Batman," nor does Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz) ever refer to her girlfriend Annika as anything other than her "roommate" (sigh), but Selina's panicked need to rescue Annika from the clutches of Gotham City's gangsters is too intense to be written off as a friendship. In the original DC comics, Selina, aka Catwoman, is canonically bisexual, so it would have been nice if Selina had said out loud that Annika was her proper, romantic lover. Even without it, however, Selina is clearly bisexual. 

She is also attracted to Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson), aka Batman, a gloomy crime-fighter who doesn't seem very good at interacting with other human beings. It's not just that Batman is emotionally distant or wounded — a certain degree of emotional trauma is a traditional part of the conventional Batman origin story — he may also be aromatic/asexual. Batman expresses no interest in women, sex, or anything other than fulfilling his goals. He only bonds with Catwoman when it comes to getting the job done. He is single-minded and unromantic in a way that implies romance is simply not on his radar. 

A lot of modern filmmakers have striven to keep their blockbusters safely within the confines of a PG-13 rating. This typically means that there will be no sex scenes or direct sexual suggestions. The stories of PG-13 movies rob heroes of any sexuality. They are too busy to bone. While the sex-related self-censorship may fulfill an unspoken four-quadrant-pleasing mandate, it also unwittingly created numerous examples of asexual representation. Aro/ace people will likely see themselves in the sexless heroes on the big screen. (Witney Seibold)

Batman Forever is a bisexual superhero dream

"Batman Forever" is a perfect bisexual allegory, forcing Bruce Wayne (Val Kilmer) to reconcile his queer desires (represented by Chris O'Donnell's Robin) and his straight ones (represented by Nicole Kidman's Chase Meridian), while also trying to adjust to being both Bruce  and  Batman. There's a whole lot of queer subtext going on , despite director Joel Schumacher denying that there's anything going on between Batman and Robin. Sometimes themes and subtext are completely unintentional, and that may be the case here, because "Batman Forever" is deliciously queer. It's a bisexual paradise, with gorgeous men and women all over the place, dressed in their camp finest. Drew Barrymore dressed like an angelic Marilyn Monroe? Debi Mazar in divinely drag-inspired devil gear? Kidman as a highly sexualized psychotherapist? O'Donnell and Kilmer in rubber suits with nipples? I'll have one of everything, please. 

In the film's big climax, Batman ends up deciding that he can have it all, combining his worlds by being with both Meridian and Robin, allowing himself to be both Bruce and Batman without it driving him insane. The following film, "Batman & Robin," takes the camp up another level and is even more full of queer allegory, but "Batman Forever" will always be my bisexual superhero movie of choice. (Danielle Ryan)

Bend It Like Beckham is chapstick lesbian perfection

Gurinder Chadha's "Bend it Like Beckham" powerfully portrays the coming-of-age experience of the youngest daughter of British Indian Punjabi Sikhs and includes a takedown of the traditional gender roles expected of young women. Now viewed as a feminist teen classic, it's also undeniably sapphic. Jesminder "Jess" Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) and Jules Paxton (Keira Knightley) might be the definition of "just gals bein' pals," because when historians unearth this film in 100 years, they're sure as hell not going to buy them being anything less than in love.

When people mistakenly think Jess and Jules kissed at a bus stop (while also mistaking Jules for a man), Jess responds with "Kissing. Me? A boy? You're mad, you're all bloody mad," which is exactly the way a straight girl talks about smoochin' dudes. (I'm being sarcastic, obviously.) And if that wasn't gay enough, "Bend it Like Beckham" features multiple songs from Mel C. on the soundtrack. That's right, Sporty Spice, the patron saint of baby butches around the globe, is the featured musical stylings of the teen girl soccer movie.

Jules was right when she said "Just because I wear trackies and play sports does not make me a lesbian," because Jules would be a lesbian no matter what she wore or was interested in. Jess and love interest Joe may kiss at the airport at the end of the film, but Jess goes to America to play soccer with Jules, where I can only predict they finally stopped kidding themselves and admitted that they were meant to be together. (BJ Colangelo)

Casino Royale is the ultimate asexual spy adventure

To hear some James Bond fans tell it, certain installments in this franchise just don't count. Even a film like 1967's "Casino Royale," which is an official adaptation of the novel, is usually dismissed because it's not part of the Eon Productions series, and because it's got a satirical approach to the character and the series. But it's not as if the other, "official" James Bond films don't play fast and loose with canon, or ignore it altogether. And several Eon films are almost as silly as "Casino Royale."

What really seems to set this misunderstood classic apart is its approach to Bond's extremely heterosexual universe, where heroism goes hand-in-hand with virility, creating a hormonal power fantasy where violence and sexual conquest are glorified. In "Casino Royale," however, the plot revolves around all the spies in the world getting killed because they won't stop having sex. Once their pants are down they're easy marks for their enemies.

The clever conceit of "Casino Royale" is that in a hypersexualized criminal underworld, an asexual hero is unstoppable. So it goes that David Niven, playing against type, stars as a version of Bond that's disinterested in sex, and has to train a new series of agents to follow suit. Sex is kryptonite, asexuality is a superpower, and so begins a proper dismantling of every heterosexual action trope we usually take for granted (but definitely shouldn't). It's funny, subversive, and proudly ace. (William Bibbiani)

The Child's Play Series has more LGBTQIA+ representation than a pride parade

Don Mancini is the only horror creative in history to provide the screenplay for every installment of a slasher franchise and is also the only one to have canonically queer and trans characters while doing it. The first three "Chucky" films were released at a time when explicit queerness was a lot harder to show on screen, but Mancini brilliantly found ways to speak to the LGBTQIA+ experience through subtext.

Andy Barclay's greatest companion is a male doll that he sleeps with every night that quickly tries to ruin his life, and will do anything to gain his approval. If that's not a Baby Gay origin story, I don't know what is. Chucky's biggest scene in "Child's Play II" happens after hiding in a closet as Andy takes up refuge with his masculine-named sister, Kyle. "Child's Play III"? Well, ol' Andy has to go to military school to learn how to be a man, don't ya know? The whole film plays out like an allegory for conversion therapy camps.

Everything about the "Child's Play" franchise has been queer from the very beginning, but as time has gone on, the property has only gotten gayer , campier, and more inclusive. Between the introduction of Glen/Glenda — the non-binary child of killer dolls Chucky and Tiffany — and just about everything Mancini has ever asked actress Jennifer Tilly to do on screen, "Child's Play" has something for everyone under the rainbow. (BJ Colangelo)

The Color Purple is a story of Black queer love and survival

It's honestly a little perplexing that Steven Spielberg's "The Color Purple" doesn't universally register as a queer film. It's based on a famously queer novel that landed its author, Alice Walker, a Pulitzer Prize for Pete's sake! Yet, even  one of the would-be stars of the "Color Purple" stage musical somehow missed the memo.

Celie, played wonderfully by Whoopi Goldberg in Spielberg's film, is a Black woman in the early 20th-century South. She is reticent and reserved from years of abuse at the hands of men, including her "husband," whom Celie calls "Mister." In time, though, Celie comes to experience romantic love thanks to Mister's outspoken mistress Shug.

Where Walker makes this relationship explicitly sexual, Spielberg restricts the story's queerness to subtext. His film shows Celie adoring a photo of Shug (Margaret Avery, also first-rate) before nursing her back to health. After the pair grow closer, Celie tells Shug her sex with Mister is deeply impersonal and unsatisfying. Shug responds with genuine affection before kissing Celie, at which point the camera pans away. Surely we all know what that means?

Spielberg has acknowledged he was overly "timid" in his handling of Celie and Shug's love story. "I was just a little embarrassed," he confessed in the documentary "Spielberg," in which his film is not unfairly accused of, essentially, Disney-fying its far grittier source material. But despite its shortcomings, "The Color Purple" remains a deeply moving and meaningful story of Black queer love and survival. (Sandy Schaefer)

Fight Club is full of queer language

"Three pitchers of beer, and you still can't ask. Cut the foreplay and just ask me. No one's watching, what do you care?" Is Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) asking the film's narrator (Edward Norton) if he wants to fight, or if he wants to have sex? 

David Fincher's 1999 film "Fight Club" might be one of the most salient criticisms of toxic masculinity to come out of its decade. "Fight Club" looked at a world where males had, after a generation of being "tough," lost their ability to express emotions openly. The narrator could only cry and achieve emotional catharsis by attending self-help groups, feeding off the mourning of others. He also cannot sleep. Something is unfulfilled in his psyche. 

Into his life comes Tyler, a sexy, devil-may-care rebel who offers him a way to bond with other men: physical violence. The men achieve a new, ultra-masculine catharsis by pounding each other in the faces. This kind of physical contact between men is, of course, a substitute for the sexual touch and romantic tenderness they crave. They are so alienated from their emotions, heterosexual fistfights have to stand in for homosexual passion. There are, "Fight Club" asserts, few things gayer than striving toward heteronomative masculinity. And the dialogue is rife with subtext. When looking at the women in his life, a character idly ponders "I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need." Perhaps, he might say next, he needs a man in his life. A father figure ... and lover?

"Fight Club" ends with a shot of a penis, a symbol of Tyler Durden's impish sexuality, appearing moments after his ostensible destruction. He lives on, the film says. His aggressive, queer energy is still a part of the narrator. (Witney Seibold)

Hard Boiled is MLM love with a bullet

John Woo is a master of practical violence, the master of gun-fu, and inarguably one of the greatest action film directors to ever do it. He's also a man who understands the importance of intimate storytelling between men, and often unintentionally invites beautifully romantic gay reads of his films. His magnum opus, "Hard Boiled" is a high-octane shoot-'em-up boasting scenes so action-packed that your eyeballs might melt out of your skull, but it's also a gentle examination of how, as I referred to it in my piece titled "Hard Boiled" is Gay, "macho posturing takes the place of vulnerability in masculine spaces."

The film stars Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung, China's answer to Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, respectively. In the midst of exquisitely choreographed bullet ballet are these two men, dripping with passion, chemistry, intensity, and love. Of course, showcasing any bit of softness — which is equated with vulnerability or *gasp* femininity — cannot exist in this world, so the duo is destined to express how they feel with more violent, aggressive actions.

Oh, and the Big Bad of the film at one point holds Chow Yun-fat at gunpoint and tells him to take his pants off and tell everyone that he's impotent in an act of public humiliation. Why? Well, if you've seen "Succession," you know what I'm saying . (BJ Colangelo)

Interview with the Vampire is an immortal gay romance

We lost one of the 20th century's most unique, prolific, shamelessly pulpy, and vocally pro-LGBTQ writers just over a year ago, and many are still mourning the loss of the inimitable Anne Rice. Though she wrote everything from erotic fiction, Christian fiction, historical novels, and memoir, Rice is best remembered for her 13-book Vampire Chronicles series. The first, 1976's "Interview with the Vampire," has lived just about as many afterlives as its iconic central vampire, Lestat. And every one of them is gloriously gay.

The terribly underrated maestro of queer sleaze, Neil Jordan, tapped the novel for a glossy, big-budget adaptation in 1994. One thing that is incredible about Rice's novel is how manifest the queer subtext is. It is in fact simply just text: The centuries-old vampire impresario Lestat falls deeply in love with his tempestuous protege Louis, and Louis falls deeply in love with the French vampire coven leader Armand. Even more incredible is the fact that Jordan sustained the romantic and sexual nature of these relationships in his film, which went on to gross four times its budget, receive two Academy Award nominations, and see Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas play the members of its vampiric love triangle.

In a 2017 interview with The Daily Beast , Rice said, "People told me 'Interview With the Vampire' was a gay allegory, and I was very honored by that." Continuing, "I think I have a gay sensibility and I feel like I'm gay, because I've always transcended gender, and I've always seen love as transcending gender." Amen. And Rice's work — and Jordan's film — transcend time. (Ryan Coleman)

Bisexual sandbox love never dies in Jennifer's Body

I've written about and spoken at length about Karyn Kusama's brilliant "Jennifer's Body" and the way it was unfairly maligned by critics and audiences alike for not fulfilling the marketing campaign's promise of "Megan Fox goes girl-on-girl," and I won't stop until people understand that this horror-comedy was never meant to appease cis straight men. No, to quote Melanie Lynskey in the most recent season of "Yellowjackets," this film is "for goths and bisexuals." Jennifer (Fox) and her best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried) have a toxic, co-dependent friendship that dates back to being toddlers in the sandbox. They're best friends, yes, but their connection is one that goes beyond platonic limitations. There's genuine, sincere affection, and when the two share a kiss on Needy's bed, it's the cumulation of a film littered with sexual tension.

When Needy calls out Jennifer for killing people, she famously snaps back, "No, I'm killing boys ." It's a joke that plays into a line I've heard so many of my bisexual friends parrot before, "I'm attracted to every woman and like one guy." Sure, that's a little reductive as far as the definition of bisexuality is concerned, but it's also the type of humor that only other queer people are going to fully understand. And that's the magic of "Jennifer's Body." It's a film speaking a language that straight men aren't fluent in, which is why the film's later-in-life reclamation was shepherded by the girls and the gays. (BJ Colangelo)

A League of Their Own has always been queer

There's no crying in baseball, but there are a lot of hot lesbians. At this point, if you don't understand the queerness of "A League of Their Own," you've either never interacted with a sapphic person in your life or you're willfully playing dumb. The beloved film was recently given a ( canceled too soon ) series adaptation that put the queer history on front street, but the implicit queerness of the film about the All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League cannot be separated because it's embedded in the story's history. Despite Rose O'Donnell being told "Don't do it so gay" while playing Doris, it's impossible to tell a story about queer history and erase the queerness. The script of Penny Marshall's 1992 film might not explicitly call it out, but it's undeniable that "A League of Their Own" is and has always been a queer text.

It was dangerous to be out in 1992 and had the film been true to the history of the Rockford Peaches, it's doubtful that the film would have ever been given the financing to come to fruition. After all, "A League of Their Own" is a story of queer triumph, not trauma, and mainstream Hollywood certainly had no interest in letting lesbians exist on screen unless for the fetishistic gaze of cis straight men or as tragedy porn fodder at the time. Fortunately, the new series took the subtext of the original and made it canonical, honoring queer history in the process. (BJ Colangelo)

Luca is a joyous queer coming-of-age romance

Just the premise for "Luca" alone earned it the nickname "Pixar's 'Call Me By Your Name'" well before its release. A coming-of-age summer story about two boys and their relationship set against a scenic Italian backdrop? There hadn't been a Pixar movie that sounded so inherently queer since the one about the archery-loving, red-haired Scottish lesbian .

Set in the '50s, "Luca" follows timid adolescent sea monster Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and his newfound adventurous companion/fellow aquatic creature Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer) as they try to win enough money to buy their own Vespa. In the film's fantasy setting, sea monsters appear to be humans out of the water, allowing Luca and Alberto to pass for two young boys as they spend their summer in the coastal Italian town of Portorosso.

The "passing" conceit in "Luca" is absolutely flexible, yet it truly works wonders as a metaphor for being queer. Add the fact that Luca's fear of being "outed" as a sea monster while on land drives much of the plot, and it becomes even clearer just how effective "Luca" is as a figurative portrayal of queer identity. Luca and Alberto's relationship with the queer-coded young Italian girl Giulia (Emma Berman) only further enriches this subtext while also doubling as a touching depiction of queer friendship.   It's why, despite the absence of an unmistakably queer romance, "Luca" makes for a joyous and otherwise better LGBTQIA+ story than  all of Disney's "first" queer movie moments combined. (Sandy Schaefer)

The Matrix is a cyberpunk trans allegory

"The Matrix" was always an audacious trans allegory, although it understandably took some time for the world to recognize this. Lilly Wachowski has candidly admitted that she and her sister Lana broached the film's message of "transformation" from a "closeted" place, having directed their trailblazing cyberpunk action flick years before either of them came out as trans. But just because the film doesn't announce its queer themes loudly and proudly like the Wachowskis' later mind-bending works , that doesn't mean you can't sense the subtext. It's almost like it's ... a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

Consider our protagonist Neo (Keanu Reeves). His nemesis, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), is a shades-sporting sentient program who delights in basically  dead-naming Neo, referring to him as "Mr. Anderson" with the same sneering energy as human clown car Ted Cruz snickering about his "pronouns." The very notion of "Mr. Anderson" is a literal construct Neo can only escape by accepting a red pill, recalling the estrogen pills that trans women and transfeminine people take as part of their hormone replacement therapy (HRT) treatment. Once he does, his physical body is then  medically transformed , allowing him to fully actualize his authentic self separate from the "mental projection of [his] digital self" The Matrix assigned to him at birth.

Early "Matrix" screenplay drafts made this trans allegory all the more obvious — and yet, even without that, one cannot overlook the Wachowskis' still all-too-radical queer metaphor today. (Sandy Schaefer)

Mulan made a man out of me

In 1998, I was a rambunctious 11-year-old tomboy who had spent her entire young life struggling against the bonds of femininity. I remember seeing "Mulan" in theaters, followed by chicken nuggets at the food court. Not since I first saw Princess Leia tell Luke and Han that somebody has to save their skins in "Star Wars" did I feel such inspiration. I wanted to be Mulan, or Ping, or both (voiced by Ming-Na Wen). I identified with Mulan's failures at the tea ceremony where she's supposed to impress the matchmaker, just like I identified with her feeling camaraderie among "the guys" when she joins the army. "I'll Make a Man Out of You" hit hard because it made me feel like maybe, with enough hard work, I could be a man too. 

"Mulan" isn't just a brilliant way for young people to understand the flexibility of gender and maybe find gender euphoria for themselves, it also features Disney's first bisexual prince, Li Shang (BD Wong). It's pretty clear that he's into Mulan when she's Ping and doesn't know how to address it, but he's attracted to her as Mulan, too. I may not have ever gotten to have a talking dragon voiced by Eddie Murphy to help me with things, but "Mulan" helped me process gender at an early age and I'm forever grateful. (Danielle Ryan)

My Fair Lady is a fascinating work of queer coding

This isn't a universal truism, but generally, the further you go back in Hollywood history, the more complex, subtextual, and symbolic the queer readings become. On its face, the classic Broadways musical adaptation of "My Fair Lady" is as straight as they come. Read heterosexually, the story of an intolerant, withholding older man (Rex Harrison) systematically breaking down a naïve, happy-go-lucky young woman (Audrey Hepburn) and building her back up into the kind of woman he prefers is actually insidious, a story as old as misogyny itself. But "My Fair Lady" is such a strange, deep, and self-conflicted work, that it's virtually impossible to take seriously on its face.

From the jump the production was rainbow-spangled: its director, George Cukor, was the greatest gay film director who ever lived; many believed the play's original author, George Bernard Shaw, was a "repressed homosexual" ; star Audrey Hepburn had already appeared in one of the most stunning, explicitly queer films of the post-studio era, "The Children's Hour"; co-star Rex Harrison would go on to star in another, "Staircase."

Harrison is at the center of the film's queer reading, though it's Hepburn who steals every scene. As is made perfectly clear in a new song that was written for the film, "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?," Harrison's Henry Higgins, who "lusts" after Hepburn's Eliza Doolittle but lives with a man (Stanley Holloway), seems like he'd much rather simply date that man than laboriously break Eliza down and rebuild her. This is what makes "My Fair Lady" such a fascinating document of the conflicting sexual mores of its time: it's as flagrantly homoerotic as it is misogynistic, and the two, both located in Higgins, are inextricable from one another. (Ryan Coleman)

The Outsiders is a powerful tribute to male romance

The relationship that queer people have with certain formative texts that shape our sensibilities is not always shared by the actual authors of those texts. A textbook example is "The Outsiders," S.E. Hinton's classic, coming-of-age novel about the bonds between down-and-out boys in post-war Oklahoma that was brilliantly adapted into a 1983 film by Francis Ford Coppola .

"The Outsiders" has inspired young queer readers for decades, as it's become a staple text in high school curricula. The fiery, romantic tale of Tulsa Greasers Ponyboy, Johnny, and Dally (portrayed passionately in the film by C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, and a never-dreamier Matt Dillon) evading the law, struggling to fit in, and fighting the world for each others' love reads to many like capital-r Romance. But Hinton didn't agree.

In response to fans inquiring whether the outsiders of "The Outsiders" could possibly be read as gay on Twitter in 2016, Hinton herself declared in unambiguous terms: "No, they are not gay. I wrote them, I ought to know." Well, that settles it. Right?

Not quite. Personally, I've never read "The Outsiders" as a gay story, even if the connections between Pony, Johnny, and Dally are so intense at times they make one blush. My reading of the Coppola film in particular, which really teases out the sweetness and subtleties between Hinton's characters, is that it is a paean to male romance. The story is riddled with what an academic might call "homosociality" — romantic energy that is not sexual, but not platonic either. Coppola created a world in which men can confide in each other, be true with one another, and love one another fiercely without fear or shame. That's something to be proud of. (Ryan Coleman)

Dorm room experiments in Re-Animator

The nervous, twitchy Herbert West ( Jeffrey Combs ) has just moved in with the studly, confident Dan (Bruce Abbott). They are both medical students at Miskatonic University. One night, Herbert, using an experimental re-agent, brings Dan's dead cat back to life. The undead cat is violent and terrifying. Dan has to kill it again. Herbert explains that his glowing green re-agent can indeed resurrect the dead, but that they turn into mindless, violent zombies. It's taboo, but extraordinary. Surreptitiously, Herbert offers to show Dan that his re-agent will work again. He injects the dead, mutilated cat once again, and it twitches back to life. They are both aghast, but fascinated. This ... this works. And it's amazing. 

Then Dan's fiancée Megan (Barbara Crampton) walks in on the two men experimenting. She is horrified. 

Substitute the injection of a dead cat with queer sexual experimentation, and the scene would play out the same, emotional-beat-for-emotional-beat. Herbert West is hardly an ultra-masculine presence that seems able of seducing Dan, but he is certainly coded queer, an outsider interested in new possibilities that the heteronormative romances around him do not provide. 

"I will not be shackled by the failures of your God," Herbert declares in the sequel, "Bride of Re-Animator." This is an allusion to the "playing God" tropes from most Frankenstein-ian stories, but he also seeks humanity, relationships ... romances? ... outside of what American bigoted Christianity dictates. And Dan? Why does he continue to follow Herbert around? Why is he so fascinated? Surely the "influence" he has on Dan might have a sexual dimension. After all, it's a story of two men who bond over the experiments they conducted in their dorm together. (Witney Seibold)

Rebel Without a Cause burns with barely-coded homoerotic passion

There may never be another cast who so thrillingly captured the zeitgeist, representing when taken together the arrival of a new style of acting, indeed an entirely new Hollywood, than the cast of Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause."

In 1955, The Method, as pioneered by Konstantin Stanislavski, was still working its way into the waters, the consent decrees that would cause the demise of the studio system had already hit Paramount Pictures, but hadn't fully taken effect yet, and likewise, the Hays Code, which bottlenecked what could be said and shown in studio films, had only just been overturned. It was the dawn of a new era, and "Rebel Without a Cause" became the decade's biggest test case in how far filmmakers could push audiences and studio execs alike.

The film starred epochal heartthrob James Dean as Jim, a rebel who honestly does eventually develop a cause, who's moved to a new town by his scared, disapproving parents so he can start over. But all he does is fall in love with vixen Judy (Natalie Wood) and become, uh, good friends with Plato (Sal Mineo). "Rebel" includes several scenes which open up ample space for a queer reading, such as a brief glimpse of a photo of Alan Ladd Plato has pinned up in his locker, or countless scenes in which Plato looks covetously on at Jim as he embraces Judy. In their making-of book on "Rebel," Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel note that an early cut of the film actually included a scene in which Jim and Plato kiss. But even without it, "Rebel Without a Cause" holds up as a thrilling piece of mid-century queer coding. (Ryan Coleman)

Rope is Alfred Hitchcock's incredibly gay thriller

Alfred Hitchcock 's 1948 film "Rope" is as queer as a studio movie of its period can be. Taking inspiration from the real-life murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb , "Rope" tells the story of two young men named Phillip (Farley Granger) and Brandon (John Dall) who, merely for an intellectual thrill, murder a classmate. They strangle their victim with a piece of rope and stuff his body in a wooden chest, all before some other friends come over for a dinner party. Hitchcock shot "Rope" to make it look as if it was all one, long continuous take, so we get to see the smugness of the murderers — as well as their panic — more or less in real-time. If they can get away with a "perfect murder," they will be irrefutably superior to the rest of society. 

Although Phillip and Brandon don't ever explicitly mention a sexual or romantic dimension to their relationship — largely taboo in 1948 — their body language, intense friendship, and mutual understanding that they are superior outsiders all point to the possibility of them being engaged in a love affair. If they were forced to live in the closet by a bigoted society, then their murder would be understandable, if not justified. Why tolerate a world that doesn't tolerate us? Our queerness makes us superior. It's simultaneously twisted and empowering.

One needn't dig deep to find the queerness in "Rope." In the 1929 Patrick Hamilton play on which the film is based, Phillip and Brandon were indeed lovers. Arthur Laurents, the film's screenwriter, was a gay man, and Farley Granger was openly bisexual. John Dall was also rumored to be gay, although he never came out in his lifetime. (Witney Seibold)

Point Break takes bromance to another level

As a preteen just getting into a serious Keanu Reeves phase, I sought out Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 action flick "Point Break," a heist movie of sorts about an undercover FBI agent named Johnny Utah (Reeves) infiltrating a gang of bank robbers led by surfer dude Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). I remember being teased for even wanting to watch it, told that it was "super gay" in a derogatory way, which only made me want to see it more. I ended up loving the movie and found myself attracted to most of the leads (Reeves? Swayze? Lori Petty? I mean c'mon, it's a total bisexual smorgasbord), and couldn't understand why people wouldn't love this earnest, exciting movie.

/Film's Valerie Ettenhofer already gave the perfect breakdown of why "Point Break" is a queer masterpiece . It's a movie that can be read as just a deeply passionate friendship between two men or it can be unabashedly queer, though "I know you want me so bad, it's like acid in your mouth" is pretty hard to take as totally straight. So why did I get grief for this film but not the equally gay "Top Gun" ? Maybe it's because the men in "Top Gun" are always in competition, their masculinity constantly reinforced as they hide their feelings, but "Point Break" lets its male leads be vulnerable with one another. That vulnerability makes "Point Break" extra emotionally resonant, and makes Utah's unwillingness to shoot Bodhi make all of the sense in the world. If that's not love, what is? (Danielle Ryan)

Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor is an unsettling trans metaphor

Brandon Cronenberg's "Possessor" is a brutally violent psychological horror film about personal identity, but it struck a chord with me as a non-binary person who has often longed to live in a different body. The film centers around Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), an assassin who uses special technology to inhabit other people's bodies and use them as her instruments of death. When she first "wakes up" in the body of Colin (Christopher Abbott), she is clearly experiencing a kind of ecstasy. She runs her new hands over Colin's muscles, staring in the mirror and looking both confused and elated at the sensations. Every act she does as Colin gives her a kind of gender euphoria, a comfort she has never known because she felt trapped by her own physical limitations. 

"Possessor" is a devastating tale about the masks we wear, pretending to be one person when in reality we're someone else entirely. For those who have no choice but to mask, like closeted trans people or folks who just haven't figured out their gender yet, Tasya's experience is oddly reassuring. Not all representation has to be positive, after all, and a little queer rage can be cathartic. (Danielle Ryan)

A Simple Favor is a farcical queer Hitchcockian meet-cute

What happens when a chipper single mom from the suburbs has a meet-cute with a chaotic bisexual femme fatale decked out in a suit worthy of the Met Gala? You get Paul Feig's farcical 2018 thriller "A Simple Favor." Anna Kendrick stars as a vlogger who befriends the debonair mother of her young son's classmate (Blake Lively), oblivious to the skeletons hanging next to the many finely-tailored outfits in her newfound bestie's closet. It's a deliciously offbeat tale of mystery and murder that's queer down to its bones, and not just because Kendrick and Lively lock lips at one point ... although there is that.

Unlike similar thrillers borne from the success of "Gone Girl," "A Simple Favor" is deeply weird in that uniquely queer sense. It's a movie where soapy plot twists are somehow played both earnestly and dripping with self-awareness, allowing Feig to suddenly toss in a broad slapstick gag at the drop of a hat. But it's Kendrick and Lively's sexually-charged cat-and-mouse game — one that evokes such queer-coded Alfred Hitchcock classics as "Strangers on a Train" — that really earns the film its LGBTQIA+ cred. The pair sip martinis, trade secrets, and swap clothes (both figuratively and literally) in what can only be summarized as an elaborate game of foreplay. 

The only real issue is that "A Simple Favor" doesn't end with its leads fleeing the cops like they're Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. Maybe the sequel can fix that . (Sandy Schaefer)

Thelma & Louise is a tragic sapphic romance

There are lots of movies out there about men who have had it with life for one reason or another and decide to go on a rampage, but what about women? Ridley Scott's 1991 classic "Thelma & Louise" follows Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon), two best friends who end up going on the road trip from hell together after Louise kills a man for attempting to rape Thelma. Along the way, Thelma snags herself a handsome young suitor (Brad Pitt), but the real romance is between the two traveling ladies. Their "straight" lives as wives in a patriarchal world weren't doing them any favors and they ended up choosing one another instead. As they embrace their own happiness and reject the lives they were given, they embrace one another as well. In the end, they choose each other and drive off a cliff with their hands clutched together instead of turning themselves into the police, which is kind of the cinematic equivalent of some newly-in-love lesbians driving off with their U-Haul in tow. 

Thelma and Louise even share a little kiss before they die, though there were plenty of other options for the ending . Thankfully we got the best one, one that highlights the power of sapphic love even in the face of extraordinary challenges. I love these ladies. (Danielle Ryan)

The Transporter and Transporter 2 created a gay action icon

The first two "Transporter" movies star Jason Statham as Frank Martin, a getaway driver and all-around badass, whose code of ethics in a world of criminality repeatedly forces him to kick a lot of ass. And while both films are exceptional in the action department, there's something about Frank that the movie never comes out and says, but seems inescapable.

Frank isn't interested in the many sexy women in his orbit. He only has sex with the first film's "romantic" lead when she's extremely forceful, and afterward he starts wearing different, more buttoned up clothing, and she complains that he doesn't talk very much anymore. In "Transporter 2" when Frank's employer makes sexual advances, he refuses her, because of, quote, "Who I am."

The "Transporter" screenplays aren't comfortable saying it out loud but Frank is gay, and has more romantic chemistry with his cop cohort Tarconi (François Berléand) than any of his women co-stars. Louis Leterrier, who directed the second installment and co-directed the first, admitted as much in interviews , even calling Frank "the first gay action hero." Sadly, subsequent films in the series walked this aspect of Frank back as much as possible, even forcing him to prove he's heterosexual at gunpoint, in a particularly awful moment in the generally awful "Transporter 3."

At least we have the first two. They're some of the best action films of the 2000s, they're wonderfully queer-coded, and that grease fight is  legendary.  (William Bibbiani)

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a superhero blockbuster about dueling pansexual polycules

A couple of films on this list nothwithstanding, there just hasn't been much queer representation in modern superhero movies. So you gotta give Sony's "Venom" movies credit for picking up a lot of that slack. Ruben Fleischer's first installment starred Tom Hardy as Eddie, a loner who forms a deeply intimate and confusing bond with an alien symbiote, and the queer-coding on their relationship was anything but subtle. But Andy Serkis's "Venom: Let There Be Carnage" took the series to new heights.

"Let There Be Carnage" isn't just the story of Venom, it's the story of Venom's polycule, with Tom Hardy trying to juggle his romantic feelings for both his ex, Anne (Michelle Williams), and his new live-in partner, Venom. Anne has also merged with Venom and admits that it's a sexual thrill, and Venom cares about Eddie's feelings for Anne, even though her fiancé Dan (Reid Scott) isn't entirely comfortable with the arrangement at first. Dan doesn't get it and he's a little jealous, but he's supportive and a good ally on multiple levels by the end of the film.

The plot of "Let There Be Carnage" finds another symbiote forming a new polycule with serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) and his girlfriend Frances (Naomie Harris), but their undoing isn't their evil plans, it's their jealousy and in-fighting. Our heroes save the day by being respectful, responsible, polyamorous and queer. The Avengers, sadly, would never. (William Bibbiani)

Queer Movie Beautiful

Kim Hyeon-mok (Pyeong, Beomhae) Choi Chan-ho (Do, Dohan) Dohwan Na (Choi, Sangwhi) Jeongho Choi (Kisoon) Jiung Choi (Alpha) Manseong Choi (Mr. Old Man) Jihyeon Lee (Mr. Depressed) Jeonghwan Lim (Rena) Taesan Won (Mr. Penis)

This is the story of one gay boy who suffers from appearance-complex, starts stealing his ideal friend's photos at Gay dating application.

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“I Love You More” Has a Queer Teen Realize Things About Love – Movie Review

From writer and director Erblin Nushi , I Love You More tells the story of an artistic young queer man trying to deal with his feelings over an online romance and a huge inevitable change heading his way.

I was provided a free digital screener of I Love You More for review. The opinions I have shared are my own.

Spoiler Warning: This review of I Love You More contains spoilers. Tread carefully!

The queer indie film I Love You More tells a somewhat low-stakes coming-of-age story centering on a young Kosovar teen named Ben (Don Shala), who is going through a flood of emotions due to experiencing his first love with Leo (Leonik Sahiti), a guy he met online. The two try to send each other online messages via their laptops and texts over their phones whenever possible over the year they have been in contact. Technology isn’t on their side as Ben and Leo have to make do with the differences in time zones and low cellphone credit. Every text and what they manage to say to each other over the phone means something because they don’t have much time together. Also, it seems both boys aren’t out to their families. Ben for sure isn’t.

There’s not much going on in Ben’s life other than how Leo’s supposed to meet him come summer. That’s all Ben can think about. He wants to see Leo in person so they can finally kiss and hug and stuff. However, Ben’s anticipated encounter is at risk of falling through when Ben’s mother, Nora (Irena Aliu), informs him about winning the Green Card lottery. They are to go to America as soon as possible to be with Ben’s sister. It’s wonderful news, of course. But Ben’s not having none of it. Moving to America would mean losing his chance to meet Leo in the summer.

What follows is a narrative that does a good job of depicting overemotional teen angst as Ben mopes and cries about the upcoming move. Kudos to Shala for playing his role as authentically as possible. Ben really got on my nerves. There were numerous moments throughout the film where I wanted to reach into the screen and give Ben a good shake. Like, Sis! Move to America! You will end up meeting more queer guys than you can handle! Think about the bigger picture here!

The film is very pretty to look at though. I liked how the camera caught the natural sunlight during some of the scenes. There’s a peaceful vibe to the setting that serves as a sharp contrast to Ben’s whirlwind of emotions.

From what I can tell, I Love You More is supposed to be a project very close to Nushi, with the end credits sharing actual photographs of Nushi’s relationship with their mother. Nushi also dedicated the film to their family members. That’s why I don’t want to be too harsh when sharing my opinions. I mean, it’s for sure a nice little emotional queer film, but the plot’s based on Nora having the patience of a saint when handling Ben. And after a while, Nora’s patience stops feeling believable.

I would have liked there to be actual heated moments between Ben and Nora as Ben begged his mother to delay purchasing their tickets to America. Nora did slap Ben during an argument, but the story quickly moved on from it. And if Nora was to be oh so understanding of Ben wanting to stay so he could meet his first love, I think the narrative should have delivered a better explanation concerning her stance.

Apparently, Nora succumbed to Ben’s wishes because she didn’t want him to distance himself from her the way Nora soured her relationship with her mother after running away to marry Ben’s father, Bashkim (Luan Jaha). However, there’s a difference between wanting to marry someone you’re in love with and putting your entire family’s future on hold because you want to see someone you met online without having any idea whether said relationship will last.

I understand giving your children a reality check (experience is the best teacher during certain cases), but Ben’s parents postponing moving to freaking America to do so just didn’t feel credible enough to me. The story could have figured something out to keep the family from moving instead of two grown adults agreeing with what Ben wanted because the plot demanded it.

And don’t get me started on Leo. That dude got on my nerves, too. With Ben being all up in his feelings over finally meeting Leo, he still couldn’t find a way to meet Ben after arriving in the area. Ben was practically begging at this point. That right there should have raised red flags for Ben, but I guess it’s true when they say love is blind. Ben was way too understanding of Leo’s questionable behavior.

Things took a turn for the worse when Ben asked Leo about whether or not he had been with someone else prior. Turns out, the two boys had made a promise to be each other’s “first” and Leo (surprise! Surprise!) broke it. While I got why Ben would ask such a question due to his possessive nature and wanting everything to be perfect and special before he flew away, I don’t think having Ben dream of Leo being with another man was necessary for him to bring it up. Was Ben supposed to be psychic? If yes… then umm… why even add that to such a story?

In the end, I Love You More came across as more of a love story between a mother and a queer son instead of whatever romantic fantasy Ben had managed to concoct in his mind over an online crush. And that’s not a bad thing when adding such a title to the larger queer media library . As I mentioned before, the film did manage to do a good job of depicting teen angst, especially the way most teenagers feel that everyone (including their parents) is against them and as a result failing to realize the genuine parental love standing right in front of them. Even though it wasn’t an easy coming out for Ben, one can argue that his parents were still supportive of him in their own way.

I just wanted the overall plot to feel more believable to me when finding a way to delay Ben and his family from moving before Leo showed up.

Approximately 90 minutes in runtime, I Love You More will be released on Video On Demand as well as physically on February 13, 2024.

You should consider watching it.

Author: Farid-ul-Haq

Farid has a Double Masters in Psychology and Biotechnology as well as an M.Phil in Molecular Genetics. He is the author of numerous books including Missing in Somerville, and The Game Master of Somerville. He gives us insight into comics, books, TV shows, anime/manga, video games, and movies.

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30 of the Most Important Queer Movies Ever Made

‘Inside Out 2’ Review: New Feelings Propel a Pixar Sequel Enchanting Enough to Second That Emotion

Riley tries to fit in with the cool kids at hockey camp (but can she still be herself?) in a sequel that comes close to matching the high of "Inside Out."

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“Inside Out 2” can’t shock us with its out-of-the-box imaginative daring the way “Inside Out” did. But the film’s director, Pixar animation veteran Kelsey Mann (making his feature filmmaking debut), and the screenwriters, Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, build on the earlier film’s playful brilliance and come about as close as we could have hoped for to matching it.

It’s the summer before high school, and Riley, who has just led her middle-school hockey team to the championship, is about to spend three days at hockey camp. She’s thrown for a loop when she learns that her two best friends, Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) and Grace (Grae Lu), won’t be attending the same high school she is. But the real factor that’s about to take over Riley is her desire to make the Fire Hawks, the high-school hockey team. (The team’s coach runs the camp, so it’s like an audition.) Riley idolizes the Fire Hawks’ leader, Valentina (Lilimar), with her rock-star attitude and fire streak of hair, and she’ll do anything to get in her good graces.

At hockey camp, Riley’s need to impress Valentina and the team’s other cool kids, at the expense of anything else (like hanging out with the good friends she mistakenly thinks are abandoning her), becomes the defining drive of her existence. And that’s where Anxiety comes in. The character, voiced with antic flair by Maya Hawke, might just as well have been named Caffeinated Calculation or Desire To Belong or Obsessive-Compulsive Social-Climbing FOMO. In “Inside Out 2,” the form that Anxiety takes — the things she pushes Riley to do — amounts to a state of existence based entirely on getting ahead, on saying the things you think others want to hear, on replacing the joy of the moment with the fear of the future (or what it might turn into if you don’t heed your Anxiety and plan for it).

As all this transpires, what’s happening in Riley’s brain is that Anxiety, facing off against Joy and the other four primal emotions, is engaged in nothing less than a war over Riley’s Sense of Self. As a teenager, Riley doesn’t just have emotions or islands of identity (Family Island has grown notably smaller) but an entire Belief System, consisting of mostly reverent thoughts (“I’m a really good friend,” “I’m a winner”) that are pictured as beams of light shooting up to the sky. That’s why Anxiety, to mount her hostile takeover of Riley’s personality, has to do more than just shuttle Joy and her crew to the Vault in the back of the mind. She’s got to replace one Sense of Self with another. Riley’s beliefs now have to be things like “If I’m a Fire Hawk, I’ve won!” or “As long as we like what they like, we’ll have all the friends we need!” The emotional battle spins around a question at once topical and metaphysical: Does Riley want to be herself, or does she want herself to be who others want her to be?    

“Inside Out 2” is a transporting fable about the desire to fit in, to be validated by the Cool Culture that is, more and more, our collective seal of approval and success. And while the movie is an enchanting animated ride of the spirit (be prepared for it to help save summer at the box office), it may also be the most perceptive tale of the conundrums of early adolescence since “Eighth Grade.”

“Inside Out 2” marks a triumphant creative return for Pixar, bringing off the thing that this studio, at its best, has done better than anyone: finding the sweet spot that merges the gaze of children and adults. The movie is really about the micro choices we all make to sculpt our personalities. Will we allow our anxiety to be greater than our joy? Will we let our need to belong overwhelm who we are? The film answers that in a way that’s heady enough to already leave you eager for another sequel, one that charts the storm inside Riley as she grows up.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, New York, June 11, 2024. In Annecy Animation Festival. MPA Rating: PG. Running time: 100 MIN.

• Production: (Animated) A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a Pixar Animation Studios production. Producer: Mark Nielsen. Executive producers: Pete Docter, Jonas Rivera, Dan Scanlon.
• Crew: Director: Kelsey Mann. Screenplay: Dave Holstein, Meg LeFauve. Camera: Adam Habib, Jonathan Pytko. Editor: Maurissa Horwitz. Music: Andrea Datzman.
• With: Amy Poehler, Kensington Tallman, Maya Hawke, Lilimar, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Tony Hale, Liza Lapira, Ayo Edebiri, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Paul Walter Hauser, Diane Lane, Kyle McLachlan, Yvette Nicole Brown, Dave Goetz, Frank Oz, Bobby Moynihan, Paula Poundstone, John Ratzenberger, Paula Pell, Flea, June Squibb.

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Andrea lewis on working with hilary duff on disney movie ‘cadet kelly,’ film resonating with lgbtq community.

"I discovered that during the pandemic, that it was this big coming out movie for people," Lewis said.

By Lexy Perez

Associate Editor

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Andrea Lewis is looking back on starring alongside Hilary Duff in the Disney Channel Original Movie Cadet Kelly and the film’s newfound resonance.

In the 2002 film, Duff portrays Kelly Collins, who is forced by her new stepfather to enroll in the George Washington Military School as a means of teaching her discipline. While she struggles to adjust to the new environment and has a rival in her commanding officer (Christy Carlson Romano), Duff’s Kelly befriends Carla (Lewis).

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“I loved Disney Channel, loved  Even Stevens , loved  Lizzie McGuire  … I was a  [The] Famous Jett Jackson  fanatic. I loved the content,” she told People magazine . “So when the movie came in — and I guess this is me revealing something about myself — because I was an actor as a kid, I would more so look at the basics. It was like, ‘Oh, movie or series,’ and you’d be like, ‘Oh, yay, OK.’ ”

She added, “And then you’d be like, ‘Do I like this character at all?’ [I] liked the character, thought she was fun, but like I said, I didn’t process what it was, who was in it, nothing of the sort.”

When she saw already Disney darlings Duff and Carlson Romano walk into the read-through, she realized the project was “kind of a big deal.” The actress, who also starred in Canada’s teen drama  Degrassi: The Next Generation , described the experience as “probably one of my most fun shoots I’d ever had — still to this day.”

She also praised her former co-star Duff and Duff’s mother: “Hilary was great. Her and her mother were so, they were very influential for my mom and me. Hilary’s mom is who encouraged us to come to L.A. and encouraged us to pursue certain things, and just to really stand on stuff.”

She added, “Hilary was the first person I had met who had, at the time, a 360 deal. She had a record deal, she also was going to be doing a movie, and she also had a series. I never heard of that. So I think in many ways, meeting Hilary when I was so young was very aspirational. You got to see somebody doing their career at a larger level.”

She also addressed the film being considered “queer coded,” something Duff and Carlson Romano have also discussed.

“Something I discovered only as an adult about  Cadet Kelly  is that it’s like a coming out movie for people. I would never, in all my years, have looked at that movie like that, seen it like that, but I discovered that during the pandemic, that it was this big coming out movie for people,” she said. “Because I know when we were shooting, it wasn’t a thought. And now looking back, you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, wait, we paint her hair in a rainbow. There’s all this tension. Yes, it was a queer movie! Did somebody know that?'”

In a 2022 Cosmopolitan interview , Duff said the film being “queer coded” was brought to her attention by her How I Met Your Father costar Tien Tran.

“She was like, ‘Oh my God. It is a moment in the queer community,’” Duff said of Tran. “All that close-talking with Jennifer. I didn’t know that. But if it helped anybody, I hope so.”

Meanwhile, Carlson Romano reflected on the discourse on  her YouTube Channel : “What I find interesting about the interpretation of the relationship between Cadet Kelly and Captain Stone is that there is a narrative that is in the culture right now that people are saying maybe they were in love, maybe there was an undercurrent of tension between the two girls.”

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‘The Bikeriders’ Review: On the Road to Nowhere, Beautifully

Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy star in a romanticized drama about a fictional motorcycle club in the 1960s.

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By Manohla Dargis

“The Bikeriders,” a romanticized ballad of tribal love, outlaw cool and the illusion of freedom, gets your motor runnin’ early. A drama flecked with absurdity and violence, it narrates the rise and inevitable dissolution of a Midwestern motorcycle club across the 1960s into the early ’70s, from the ebbing of the greaser era and past the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Not much happens, but the people are beautiful and so too are their bikes, rumbling beasts that tribe members ride and ride on that familiar closed loop known as Nowheresville, U.S.A.

The first essential thing to know about “The Bikeriders” is that the writer-director Jeff Nichols has, improbably, based the movie on a totemic photography book of the same title by the great American photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon . The second thing is that the movie stars Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy, a troika of charisma bombs who just have to show up for me to do the same. Nicely supported by a sprawling cast of other good lookers and hard workers, these three are among the draws in a movie that understands the seductions of beauty, the sensuous lines of a human body, the curves of a chassis.

The story, such as it is, traces the evolution of a fictional Chicago-area motorcycle club, the Vandals, from its racer origins. Scrambling the chronology, Nichols opens the story midway in 1965 with one member, Benny (Butler), being harassed at a bar by two strangers who want him to remove his “colors,” his ragged denim vest adorned with the club’s name. (Why? Why not?) Soon, punches are being thrown, and one stranger is swinging a shovel at the back of Benny’s head. Nichols freezes on Benny’s face with the shovel framed behind him like a cockeyed metal halo, a wryly funny image that captures a moment in time, much as Lyon did in his photos, and heralds the violence — its threats and giddy thrills — of the bikers’ lives.

For a few years in the early and mid-1960s when Lyon was in his 20s, he rode with a real Chicago club, the Outlaws, one of the oldest such groups in the country, charting his adventure in photographs and audio recordings. In 1968, the year before Dennis Hopper ’s biker film “Easy Rider” opened, Lyon published “The Bikeriders,” a collection of black-and-white photos with accompanying interviews. One of his interviewees was the real Benny’s wife, Kathy Bauer, a philosopher of male behavior whom Nichols has made the narrator and is played by Comer with rough charm and a chewy, g-dropping accent. (You can compare her pitch-perfect interpretation of Bauer’s voice on Lyon’s website bleakbeauty.com .)

Using the book as his lodestar, Nichols borrows from Lyon by turns directly, elliptically and sometimes clumsily, while making some instructive omissions: Some of the bikers wear Iron Cross patches, but if there's a Nazi swastika or Confederate flag here, emblems flaunted by some white bikers including Danny’s old Outlaw pals, I missed it. Nichols’s most cumbersome move is to have turned Lyon into a supporting character, a bland, earnest smiler (Mike Faist), who basically holds a mic while Kathy chronicles her biker life and times. More subtle and intriguing are Nichols’s efforts to capture the power of Lyon’s photos which — with their dynamic mixture of pictorial beauty and thematic grit, hyper-masculinity and homosocial intimacy — tell a specific 20th-century American story of being and belonging.

To that end, Nichols at times re-creates the original photographs, say, with a shot of Benny riding alone across a bridge while looking backward, an image that condenses the paradoxes of his life. Like the other club members, Benny tends to rack up miles without going anywhere very far, a provincialism that is one of the most American things about them. In another scene, Kathy recounts the first time she saw Benny, head bowed, leaning on a barroom pool table with his bared, muscly arms. Nichols catches this moment memorably, as does Comer, whose face opens in wonder as the camera pushes in toward Benny and he raises his head.

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