17 best queer films of 2025 ranked, from Pillion to Wicked: For Good
From Cynthia Erivo’s pointy black hat to Alexander Skarsgård’s licked leather boots, these are the best LGBTQ+ films of 2025. (BFI/Universal Pictures/Black Bear Pictures/A24)
From Cynthia Erivo's pointy black hat to Alexander Skarsgård's licked leather boots, these are the best LGBTQ+ films of 2025. (BFI/Universal Pictures/Black Bear Pictures/A24)
This year was spent feeling like the world was seconds from implosion, our rights as LGBTQ+ people were moments from being yanked out of our hands, and our safety was getting more precarious by the second.
What a joy then to be able pop into the cinema, shut your evil phone off, and stare at a 50 foot screen watching Cynthia Erivo in green paint for 120 minutes. That was of course family-friendly Hollywood blockbuster Wicked For Good, but 2025 also gifted us without a shot of Alexander Skarsgård’s penis (Pillion), Ayo Edebiri slapping Julia Roberts (After The Hunt) and a lesbian detective caper featuring Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley (Honey Don’t).
As some anonymous person on the internet once said: we were sat this year.
Here are 17 of the very best LGBTQ+-inclusive films of 2025.
17. A Night Like This
The debut feature from director Liam Calvert, A Night Like This stars Alexander Lincoln as Oliver, a wannabe musician and formerly rich club owner, as he meets Lukas (Jack Brett Anderson), a gay German man at a pub at Christmas time. What follows is a touching story about emotional connection and platonic relationships that throws away ideas that sex is needed for a story to be about intimacy.
Instead the film is more focused on the main character’s self development, and while there are queer moments of attraction and intimacy, it’s far from the priority. A refreshing film that premiered at BFI Flare earlier this year, A Night Like This encourages audiences to put down the screens and connect with humans on a fundamental level.
16. After the Hunt
After a blistering 2025 with both Challengers and Queer, director Luca Guadagnino returned to the big screen with After the Hunt, a film less rapid but just as intense. The psychological thriller plots a triptych of characters as they become embroiled in a sexual abuse accusation.
College professor Alma (Julia Roberts) walks a tightrope between her star student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) and her colleague and friend Hank (Andrew Garfield) as they point fingers at each other. It’s another Guadagnino feat of extrapolated tension and nail-biting editing that twists and turns with each whispered confession. It’s a portrait of the pitfalls of cancel culture and how society treats and questions victims who bravely come forward.
15. On Swift Horses
Based on Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel of the same name, On Swift Horses focuses on newly weds Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Lee (Will Poulter) as the former pines for the latter’s younger brother, Julius (Jacob Elordi), a Korean War veteran turned gambler.
Muriel and Julius stay in touch despite the geographical distance they maintain with both characters also exploring queer relationships separately, Julius with Henry (Diego Calva) whom he meets at a Las Vegas casino, and Muriel with Sandra (Sasha Calle). The film’s marketing was criticised for being ‘straight-washed’ for implying a non-existent romance between Muriel and Julius as a way of attracting audiences. It indicates that there’s still some way to go for queer cinema.
14. Hot Milk
If you look closely, you can practically see the tension in Hot Milk vibrating in every sun-burnt scene – and no, that’s not just the heat refraction along the Spanish coast in which it’s set. Fiona Shaw and Emma Mackey play waspish, coercive mother and quietly seething daughter, Rose and Sofia in this incandescent drama about untended trauma and unexplored desire.
The pair have travelled to Almería to seek help from a peculiar doctor to fix an ailment which has left Rose wheelchair bound; one which she may or may not be making up. Sofia, bogged down by her mother’s co-dependence, seeks refuge in an enigmatic local Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), and learns that summers of love aren’t the fairytale they’re made out to be.
13. Honey Don’t!
All you had to do to get us to watch Honey Don’t! was say it had Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley in. Add to that the two engaging in a queer romance as well as Captain America himself, Chris Evans (appearing at one point in nothing but a jockstrap) and we’re seated.
The lesbian detective film sees Qualley’s Honey investigate a cult with Plaza tagging along as police officer MG Falcone. The second film in a “lesbian B-movie trilogy,” following on from Drive-Away Dolls by filmmaking couple Ethan Coen and Tricia Cook. Sadly it wasn’t a hit with audiences or critics but we’ll still be there when the final movie of the trilogy comes out. Hopefully, so will Qualley and Plaza with more of their “instant” chemistry.
12. Plainclothes
This period feature starring Russell Tovey and Tom Blyth proved quite timely when it was released in October. Showing how gay men were persecuted at a time when they couldn’t be so open about their love or sex, there were haunting similarities in today’s treatment of queer people that proved why queer stories like these need to be told.
In this intimate and tense two-hander, Tovey and Blyth shone as two men drawn together with their relationship threatening to tear everything apart. Snatching the US Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast – which includes Amy Forsyth, Christian Cooke, Maria Dizzia, and Gabe Fazio – at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Plainclothes was a hit with both critics and audiences.
11. Kiss of the Spider-Woman
It wouldn’t be a capital ‘Y’ year in cinema without a theatre adaptation bombing at the box office. This year’s victim was Bill Condon’s revolutionarily milquetoast rendition of Kiss of the Spider-Woman.
Based on the 1992 stage musical of the same name, which is itself based on a 1976 novel from Argentinian author Manuel Puig, the film follows Valentín Arregui (Diego Luna), a political prisoner during the closing days of Argentina’s Dirty War. During his imprisonment, the revolutionary dissident meets Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), a gay window dresser charged with public indecency. An unlikely bond forms between the pair as Molina recounts their favourite in-universe musical, the Kiss of the Spider-Woman.
Claustrophobic in setting and scope, the film manages to serve spectacular visuals with its brutalist depictions of Molina and Arregui’s cell, offset by the vibrant scenes in the former’s favourite musical. Sadly, it does nothing spectacular, nor memorable, with its set pieces, which might be the reason it earned just $2 million against a budget of $30 million.
10. Wicked: For Good
Those who have seen Wicked the stage musical will be aware that Wicked: For Good was destined for a comparatively lukewarm critical response after 2024’s blockbuster first half, Wicked. The second act of the story is on paper darker and more serious; a mean feat to manage when Jon M. Chu’s adaptation has been sold on Ariana Grande’s bubbly, high-spirited Glinda and Cynthia Erivo’s starkly contrasting earnestness as Elphaba.
Still, Wicked: For Good is a hefty, sprawling conclusion to one of the biggest pop culture monoliths of the 2020s, and Erivo and Grande’s chemistry remains pleasingly watertight. We’ll miss seeing them together on screen.
9. Christy
Sydney Sweeney is compelling in David Michôd’s biopic of Christy Martin, the woman who put women’s boxing on the map in the 1990s. Beginning in Martin’s teendom, Christy follows the bolshie boxer through her unexpected, bitty rise in the ring, her closeted marriage to her abusive, revolting husband Jim Martin (Ben Foster) and how she survived – both metaphorically and literally – when the wheels of her career fell off, and her husband took brutal revenge. It’s a car crash of a film: vicious and agonising, and yet impossible to look away from.
8. Sebastian
It’s not often that stories about sex work are told from the male perspective, which makes Sebastian stand out for that reason. Max works as a literary journalist while moonlighting as a sex worker, taking on the name Sebastian. At first max uses his sex work as a way to inform his writing, but slowly finds more liberation in his work.
The film shows Max engaging in sex work out of choice, not necessity as is often portrayed. By doing so it frames Max/Sebastian as someone more in control of his situation, not a victim to it. The film also provides a fresh take on those seeking out sex workers. The story is well told over its near two-hour runtime and is led by a strong performance from Ruaridh Mollica with a supporting cast including Jonathan Hyde, Hiftu Quasem, and Ingvar Sigurdsson.
7. The Wedding Banquet
Few film remakes manage to find an equilibrium between honouring the original work, and updating it sufficiently to make it worth the bother. Andrew Ahn, the man behind Fire Island, exceeded expectations with his do-over of the 1993 classic comedy of errors The Wedding Banquet.
In his version, Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone are a lesbian couple struggling to pay for IVF, while Bowen Yang and Han Gi-chan are a young gay couple plagued by one’s expiring visa, and the other’s aversion to commitment. Min (Gi-chan) and Lee (Gladstone) get scheming and plot to get wed, solving Min’s green card issue, with the artist offering to pay for Lee’s IVF in return. Min’s matriarchal grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) arrives unexpectedly, upending the plan and sending the foursome into chaos. It’s just a real fun time.
6. Blue Moon
Ethan Hawke very much deserves the Oscars buzz around his new comedy biopic Blue Moon, in which he plays bisexual Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart with endearing chutzpah and poorly shrouded fragility. A chamber piece, Blue Moon is set in New York’s Sardi’s restaurant on the opening night of new Broadway musical Oklahoma!, which is written by Hart’s former creative partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott).
As he attempts to prove his brilliance to Sardi’s staff and punters, to Rodgers himself, and to the object his affection Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), the jettisoned writer sinks deeper into a state of despair and desperation. Despite Hawke’s terrifically campy performance and Robert Kaplow’s funny script, Blue Moon is shot through with sadness.
5. Come See Me in the Good Light
Come See Me in the Good Light is cinematic proof that the all-too human struggles of LGBTQ+ people go far beyond just the stigma we face for our sexuality. This award-winning 104-minute emotional rollercoaster, directed by Ryan White, follows poet Andrea Gibson and their spouse, Megan Falley as they cope with Gibson’s fight against ovarian cancer.
Everything about the film is real and tangible, from the bags under Gibson’s eyes as they sit with Falley during rounds of chemotherapy to the old Polaroid childhood photos that act as humbling anchor points between each touching or heartbreaking moment. It is a brutally honest film, one that refuses to give its viewers false hope, but proves to them that joy is possible through pain.
4. Hedda
Tessa Thompson delivers one of the most powerful, nuanced performances of the year in Hedda, a provocative and sensual queer drama. Filmmaker Nia DaCosta’s modern reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play imbues the text with a fresh spirit that is gorgeously alluring.
The film sees Hedda (Thompson) restless in her marriage to academic George Tesman (Tom Bateman). Her aching desire for more goes wayward one evening when her poised ex-lover, Eileen Lövborg (Nina Hoss), unexpectedly swans in during a party. Hedda just about loses her mind as she sees a chance to escape the unfulfilling nature of her life. With a glint in her eye, Hedda embarks on a night of mayhem and mischief. Though it’s set in upper-class 1950s society, DaCosta’s film doesn’t shy away from thrilling sexiness as power and class clash.
3. Twinless
In Twinless, nothing is quite as it seems. James Sweeney wrote and directed this psychological comedy in which he stars as Dennis, a young man in the jaws of grief after the death of his identical twin. It seems cosmic, then, that he meets Ricky (Dylan O’Brien), another man in the exact same situation. The pair quickly bond over their respective losses, but as they get to know each other more, there’s something deeper that connects them, something totally unexpected.
Hype for Twinless grew after sex scenes featuring O’Brien leaked, which is unfortunate, but if it brings more people out to see the film, they’ll realise O’Brien’s performance is his finest to date. His role isn’t easy, one of complex, multifaceted nuance that, with lesser skill, would fall flat. Expertly paced with jaw-dropping swings, Twinless is a must-watch.
2. Sorry, Baby
Writer-director Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby is a remarkable feat for a directorial debut, so much so that it’s almost unbelievable that this is their first feature. The bittersweet film follows English professor Agnes (Victor), isolated in rural New England, as she navigates memories of an assault, trying to move on, but finding herself stuck in life.
Even with all the heaviness of the film’s subject, Victor’s film maintains a playfulness that is exceptionally funny. Alongside touching non-binary representation and an adorable kitten, the heart of Sorry, Baby is the precious connection between two platonic queer friends. The heartwrenching sincerity between Agnes and Lydie (Naomi Ackie) is beautiful to witness and such a rarity in cinema.
1. Pillion
Arriving at the end of the year, Pillion was the BDSM gay rom-com we never knew we needed. Starring Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling it tells the story of the dom biker, Ray, and his sub, Colin.
Set against a world of BDSM, motorbikes, and leather, it’s a surprisingly emotional film that explores intimacy rarely seen on the big screen and what happens when we disrobe our bike leathers and allow ourselves to be vulnerable. With the existence of a “raunchier” version being teased by the film’s cast as well as director Harry Lighton, Pillion is a film that will have us coming back for more.
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