Kilian Melloy’s Twelve Top Queer Films from 2025
QV’s Kilian Melloy looks at the queer films released in 2025 and chooses his faves
Let’s let straight Hollywood (and Bollywood and independent cinema and all the rest) take care of itself for a moment while we survey the glorious LGBTQ+ filmscape that graced the big screen during 2025, a year in which most anything in the way of reel life would have to be better than real life. Major surprises, minor miracles, and even a few disappointments came our way — but even where the movies fell short, they didn’t feel small. Here’s my year-end summary of what was magnificent and what misfired over the last twelve months.
Twinless
The plot of James Sweeney’s touching, hilarious, and totally f’d up rom com is that two men meet at a bereavement group for those who have lost a twin sibling. Roman (Dylan O’Brien) is straight and just in town for the funeral of his identical brother, Rocky; Dennis (Sweeney), who is gay, shares that he lost his twin brother, Dean. Commiseration quickly grows into friendship, and then things get dark and twisted. Visually inventive, narratively fearless, and featuring stellar work from its cast, this is one of those small movies that punches well above its weight.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Did you know that Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel about a political prisoner and a gay, movie-obsessed hairdresser locked up under Argentina’s dictatorship had been turned into a 1992 Kander & Ebb stage musical following Héctor Babenco’s 1985 film adaptation? Did you know that Bill Condon has made a new movie version based on the musical? Did you know that Condon’s film is a work of sheer, unexpectedly joyful genius? Probably. If not, now you do. Diego Luna stars opposite out actor Tonatiuh in the roles originally brought to the screen by Raul Juila and William Hurt, and what screen they don’t burn up is promptly torched by Jennifer Lopez.
Pillion
Alexander Skarsgård plays gay (thank you, entire pantheon of gods!) in Harry Lighton’s film version of Adam Mars-Jones’ 2020 novel Box Hill. As Ray, a tall, charismatic, and drop-dead gorgeous man of uncertain provenance, Skarsgård dominates the movie… literally… even though the story is told from the perspective of Colin (Henry Melling), a timid gay man who still lives with his parents and is too shy to date. When Colin and his family sing in a close quartet at a bar where Ray happens to be poring over a book (his favorite pastime when not roaring around on a motorcycle or having aggressive sex), the two take a liking to each other — but it’s Ray who takes charge, handing Harry his number with the supreme confidence of a dom’s dom. Thrilled, Harry follows up, and soon finds himself swept into a hot erotic milieu that features leather, bikers, a locked chain around his neck, and flashes of such sweet tenderness that he can’t help coming back for more. A transformation follows as Colin leans into the power of his devotion: The submissive finds his talent for control, and, eventually, no longer shies away from power struggles. Stunning, surprising, and acutely observed, this is not a movie for everyone… and we like it that way.
Plainclothes
Tom Blythe stars in writer-director Carmen Emmi’s debut feature. The 1990s-set drama follows closeted vice squad officer Lucas (Blythe) as he navigates family tensions around his father’s death and his uncle’s freeloading, as well as the on-the-job general homophobia he’s internalized as a lure to coax gay men into restroom sex, setting them up for arrest. Increasingly unhappy with a charade of heterosexuality that has already seen him break up with his former fiancée, Lucas makes a genuine connection with Andrew (Russell Tovey), a somewhat older man he can’t bring himself to entrap; instead, the two enjoy a handful of hookups that confuse, enrapture, and ultimately liberate Lucas. Tense and ebullient by turns, this atmospheric drama has the hallmarks of an enduring classic.
The History of Sound
Two musicologists in World War I-era America — Lionel (Paul Mescal) and avid (Josh O’Connor) — meet at conservatory, enjoy a brief affair, and then go their separate ways, only to join up again for a tour of rural America, recording folk songs for posterity. South African director Oliver Hermanus (Moffie) has a sense for rustic Americana, and an even keener grip on how closeted men in homophobic societies survive and flourish… or don’t. The fact that the film features gay-fave straight stars Mescal and O’Connor (both of whom have played gay before and are clearly comfortable with it) makes The History of Sound an irresistible draw, and the story of an intense, but brief affair and the unquenchable passion it ignites has prompted comparisons to Brokeback Mountain. But this is a movie with a melody of its own, and Hermanus doesn’t get a note wrong.
Come See Me in the Good Light
The Apple TV+ documentary Come See Me in the Good Light follows spoken word poet (and Colorado poet laureate) Andrea Gibson as they face the ups and downs of a battle with cancer during their final year. With time broken into three-week segments thanks to a routine of tests and scans, Gibson deals with terror, joy, grief, and a succession of lost mailboxes (thanks to snow plows, wind storms, and bears) and draws poetry from raw experience. Unfiltered and immediate, the moments captured by director Ryan White (along with intimate interviews) feel as resonant and real as Gibson’s poetry.
Peter Hujar’s Day
Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall take on the transcript of a daylong conversation between queer photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz in Ira Sachs’ (Passages, Love is Strange) elegant, idiosyncratic two-hander. When Rosenkrantz came up with the idea of interviewing New York artists about a typical day in their lives and turning those exchanges into a book, Hujar was on board; he kept notes of his doings on December 18, 1974, with tasks like photographing Alan Ginsberg for The New York Times and dealing with the strange interludes his friends visited upon him. The following day, he told Rosenkrants all about it. The tape recording was lost, but the transcript survived. Hujar almost speaks in photographs, his imagery direct and his participation unhesitating, while Rosencrantz, perhaps subconsciously, helps guide and shape the flow of words. Under Sachs’ direction, you could listen to Whishaw read the phone book and be transfixed; Hall doesn’t even have to do that. She nails your attention just by listening.
Misericordia
When French filmmakerAlain Guiraudie (Stranger By the Lake) makes a movie, gay audiences pay attention. That’s because Guiraudie is a master of elongated sexual frisson, slow-boiling japes, and sustained suspense, juggling them all while filling the screen with striking imagery. Case in point: Misericordia, in which a shifty young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) shows up in his tiny home town to pay his respects to his onetime employer, the village baker. But he’s not just stopping through to attend a funeral; he’s dipping his toes back into a river that’s rushing with half-submerged emotional debris from the past, including what might or might not be an unresolved gay relationship with the dead man’s son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand). Sensing a mix of grief and unleashed desire on the part of the baker’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), and being enough of a grifter to exploit it, Jérémie all but moves into the dead man’s home, enraging Vincent and precipitating a showdown that ends in murder. With suspicious cops circling him and the local vicar pursuing his own line of investigation, Jérémie has few options but to lie, dodge, and seduce — or submit — his way to redemption. Black humor collides with dark deeds in a film that feels lighter than a puff pastry but carries a mean and weighty sting.
Went Up The HIll
Writer-director Samuel Van Grinsven and his co-writer, Jory Anast, reinvent the ghost story with a body horror/sexual violation angle that you see coming, but simply can’t believe. When a queer young man named Jack (Dacre Montgomery) shows up for the funeral of his long-estranged mother — at the invitation, or so he believes, of her younger wife, Jill (Vicky Krieps) — he steps into a maelstrom of fury and obsession that reaches from the grave into the deepest recesses of his troubled soul. Filmed in an imposingly stark, modernist house that feels aptly cold and sepulchral, and set in a remote and snowy New Zealand locale, the movie carries a sense of abandonment and desolation that matches the mood of the characters, both of whom are bereaved in their own way. Possession and possessiveness mingle and merge as the demons of the past tangle with fading hopes for a happier future, and your goosebumps might not subside for hours.
Sauna
This queer Danish romance from directorMathias Broe preserves novelistic narrative complexities (it was adapted from the 2021 novel by Mads Ananda Lodahl) but leans into cinematic techniques as it tells the story of how a sweet young gay man named Johan (Magnus Juhl Andersen) fares in the big city of Copenhagen after leaving behind a life of small-town homophobia. Working at a gay sauna gives him plenty of chances for hookups, which he supplements by using a dating app; it’s through the latter that he meets William (Nina Rask), a trans man with whom he is instantly smitten. The two bring a lot of baggage to the relationship; Johan doesn’t get along with his disapproving parents and he’s still drifting along with few prospects, while William has a plan for his life and his transition — plans he fears could be derailed if his bid for gender reassignment is rejected. It doesn’t help that Johan’s sauna colleagues demonstrate anti-trans hostility toward William. As any young couple might, the two bicker and quarrel thanks to their focus on their own issues, but the impulsive Johan also takes his devotion in reckless directions, with unfortunate results. Andersen and Rask have a palpable chemistry, while Broe’s direction guides the film with a delicate touch that can get intense when needed.
Hedda Gabler
Nia DaCosta tackles Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler with a brisk contemporary energy that Baz Luhrman might envy, boldly updating the source material by casting the fantastic Tessa Thompson in the title role and gender-flipping Hedda’s former lover Eilert (who is also the chief rival of Hedda’s husband, George, for a university position), reimagining him as Eileen (Nina Hoss), a brilliant academic whose scandalous book, yet to be published, is already causing waves of disruption. Hedda’s plan for an elegant social occasion that will burnish George’s reputation and help secure him the coveted professorship comes apart at the seams — we know this from the opening moments, when police arrive at ask about “the incident” from the night before — but could anyone familiar with Hedda’s taste for chaos and high living have expected anything else? DaCosta makes sure that the party Hedda throws is the wildest blowout this side of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, and Thompson brings a mischievous luminosity to the role that lights up the entire movie.
On Swift Horses
Two parallel queer lives glance off each other in director Daniel Minahan’s film version of the 2019 novel of the same name by Shannon Pufahl. Grifter Julius (Jacob Elordi) meets his sister-in-law, Muriel (Daisy Ridley-Scott), only briefly while paying a visit to his brother Lee (Will Poulter), who is freshly back from the Korean War. Lee’s ambition is to move to San Diego and take his ne’er-do-well younger brother with him, but Julius has other, sketchier plans. Lee and Muriel do move to San Diego, but Julius heads to Las Vegas, dreaming of easy money and soft marks for his scams. What he meets there is a culture of suspicious, hard-nosed casino operators who are apt to thrash anyone they catch cheating. But he also meets Henry (Diego Calva), whose yen for the hustle outstrips Julius’ own. Meantime, Julius keeps up a slightly flirtatious (and surprisingly sincere) correspondence with Muriel, who has found a few illicit thrills of her own in the form of gambling at the racetrack and pursuing a lesbian affair. Someone is bound to get hurt as dreamers and idlers swirl around each other in long, loose orbits and 1950s America roars with prosperity and forbidden pleasures for those enterprising enough to chase after them.
Near Misses and Honorable Mentions
I Don’t Understand You
It’s queer horror comedy as Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells head to Italy as gay couple Dom and Cole. Cluelessly self-involved, the two are already on a trajectory of terror when they set out to become parents (Amanda Sefried drops by for some video chats as a pregnant woman willing to let these two adopt her baby), but things get really dark when night falls and their sunny Italian vacation turns into a nocturnal festival of paranoia and bloodshed. The body count soars, Morgan Spector astounds with a cameo in which he spouts rapid-fire Italian, and writer-directors David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano deliver one twist after the next. It’s spec
It’s queer horror comedy as Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells head to Italy as gay couple Dom and Cole. Cluelessly self-involved, the two are already on a trajectory of terror when they set out to become parents (Amanda Sefried drops by for some video chats as a pregnant woman willing to let these two adopt her baby), but things get really dark when night falls and their sunny Italian vacation turns into a nocturnal festival of paranoia and bloodshed. The body count soars, Morgan Spector astounds with a cameo in which he spouts rapid-fire Italian, and writer-directors David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano deliver one twist after the next. It’s spectacular silliness.tacular silliness.
The Wedding Banquet
It seemed like Andrew Ahn could do no wrong after directing queer hits like Fire Island and Spa Night; when he and James Schamus, the writer of the original Ang Lee-directed The Wedding Banquet, got together to write this new take, a solid gold gay movie seemed guaranteed. The ingredients are all there: Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, and Han Gi-Chan star as two couples who can help each other out with their respective problems (IVF, the need for a green card), and Joan Chen (Saving Face), who narrowly missed out on starring in the original, is on hand in a delightful subplot about a mother that’s too eagerly accepting. Despite all this, the update doesn’t measure up to the Lee’s 1993 masterpiece, which has held up just fine over the years.
Blue Moon
Ethan Hawke has done some fine work over the years, but his depiction of lyricist Lorenz Hart — the original creative partner to musical theater genius Richard Rodgers, and a genius in his own right — may be a career best… when he gets it right. There are a few moments when Hawke doesn’t seem to know how to play gay in an authentic way. Even less authentic, though, is the story; it’s true that Hart showed up to the party after the premiere of Oklahoma!, the instant hit Rodgers wrote with Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney), but just about everything else in the film is seemingly invention, including the nature and extent of Hart’s crush on a glamourous young woman named Elizabeth Weilend (Margaret Qualley). Still, Richard Linklater’s direction, Bobby Cannavale’s brilliant turn as a sympathetic Sardi’s bartender, Cillian Sullivan’s show-stealing performance as a young Stephen Sondheim, and Shane F. Kelly’s cinematography all make this worth the watch — even if you have to drag yourself through the movie’s final third.
And Watch the Trailers:
Twinless
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Pillion
Plainclothes
Leave a Reply