The Best LGBTQ+ Movies of 2025

No matter what the conservative politicians or any of the other bigots in the world have to say about it, queer people aren’t going anywhere and there were a panoply of great films in 2025 that prove it. Movies that stretched across genres, mediums, and multiple communities to share joy, fear, unity, loneliness, complexity, silliness, sorrow and laughter.

We say, may 2026 bring even more wonderful queer films to the foreground, in defiance of all those who want to shove these characters and stories and themes back into the closet (we’re looking at you, Disney). For now, these are our picks for the best LGBTQ+ movies of 2025.

‘Blue Moon’

Richard Linklater had one hell of a year, directing two transcendent biopics that were released within weeks of each other: “Nouvelle Vague,” the story of Jean-Luc Godard kickstarting his career by directing “Breathless,” and “Blue Moon,” the story of famed lyricist Lorenz Hart, just months before his death, on the night he realizes everyone he loves is moving on without him.

Ethan Hawke gives one of his best performances — which is saying something — as a bisexual artist seeking love wherever he can find it. He finds friendship, and he finds people who respect his work, but nobody who cares about him enough to put up with his emotional sloppiness and socially awkward desperation to connect. And yet, ironically, “Blue Moon” makes the case that the same qualities that made Hart hard to love made his work so very lovely, since he understood yearning — from any type of person, for any type of person — better, perhaps, than any of his peers.

‘Castration Movie Anthology II: The Best of Both Worlds’

Louise Weard’s astonishingly ambitious, impossibly edgy and weirdly insightful “Castration Movie” is that rare motion picture phenomenon: a film that’s truly independent, in every sense of the word. Filmed on a shoestring, with the aesthetic of an early-2000s mini-dv experiment, Weard’s ongoing anthology tackles topics that many filmmakers and audiences consider taboo, with a sophistication of thought that belies its almost Troma-esque presentation.

“The Best of Both Worlds” is the second installment, a nearly five-hour genre-bending drama about Circle (Alexandria Walton), a trans woman escaping a basement-dwelling cult in Bushwick, eventually running into Keller (Ivy Volk, from “Anora”) a formerly non-binary woman who could be the love of her life, or could just have another overwhelming personality that threatens to overpower Circle’s own fragile sense of self. Along the way Weard challenges our collective notions of gender, how to discuss gender, the urge to withdraw from a culture and political system that’s increasingly hostile to trans people, and just for the heck of it, plain ol’ hot dogs.

You don’t have to see the first “Castration Movie” to appreciate the genius of the second, since it works entirely on its own, but you know what? You should.

‘Everything’s Going to Be Great’

Jon S. Baird has made a couple of incredibly sweet, soulful movies about life in the theater, and he doesn’t get enough credit for it. His Laurel & Hardy biopic “Stan & Ollie” was one of the best biopics of the 2010s, and his largely-overlooked coming of age drama “Everything’s Going to Be Great” is just as charming and sincere.

The film stars Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as Lester Smart, the openly gay son of two would-be theater impresarios, played by Bryan Cranston and Alison Janney. Lester’s parents have been on the verge of making it big their entire adult lives, but they never do, so the family hasn’t had one single moment of financial or familial stability. Lester romanticizes this life but his mother and straight older brother are getting pretty sick of it, and eventually it falls to Lester to figure out how to make the most of a life where he might not become a great artist, and might get stuck in (sigh) Kansas.

“Everything’s Going to Be Great” tenderly, if maybe a little slickly, captures the sense that you’re destined for great things, but the great things haven’t got the memo yet so you haven’t had the chance. This applies to Lester’s art, his queerness, and I suspect to every single one of us at one time, or many times, in our lives.

‘Hedda’

Henrik Ibsen was a renowned late-19th century playwright whose controversial works emphasized interiority of his women protagonists and shined a light on the inequities they face every day, even when they’re doing everything society tells them to. Because the only reward men give out for letting them treat you badly is treating you even worse. His 1891 play “Hedda Gabler” is a milestone in the theater, but like all centuries-old milestones it sometimes needs a bit of a scrub and a polish to stay relevant.

Then of course, came Nia DaCosta, who didn’t just scrub “Hedda Gabler,” she scoured it to the core, revealing new depths and deeper meanings. Her new adaptation “Hedda” stars the superhumanly talented Tessa Thompson as an independent woman who married for financial convenience. When that convenience is threatened she will do anything to secure her bag or, failing that, flee into the night with her old lover, played by a superb Nina Hoss, who just happens to be the workplace rival of Hedda’s husband.

DaCosta’s take on “Hedda” transposes the action to the 1950s, and the newly exposed layers of queerness and racial tensions not only revitalize Ibsen’s play, they arguably make it better than ever.

‘Lavender Men’

Don’t call it a biopic. Lovell Holder and Roger Q. Mason’s “Lavender Men” — about an alleged gay love affair between Abraham Lincoln and his legal clerk, Elmer E. Ellsworth — is officially a “fantasia.” Not the truth, but not quite a lie, “Lavender Men” is a fabulized take on Lincoln’s life in which the historical figures are encouraged to explore a more fascinating interpretation of their historic relationship, courtesy of a lonely and introspective non-binary stage manager named Taffeta (Mason).

Taking place entirely on a stage, after hours, “Lavender Men” takes the notion of “living theater” literally, as Lincoln (Pete Ploszek) and Ellsworth (Alex Esola) initially refuse to participate in Taffeta’s vision, because every time they tell their life stories they have to relive their deaths. Taffeta is more interested in reliving their love, and Lincoln’s often glossed-over racism, as they themselves explore their own identity, sexuality, and inner strife. Abraham Lincoln gets to have everything, even a legendary (possibly apocryphal) queer romance, and what does Taffeta get? What significance does the storyteller have when their subject hogs all the fascination?

It’s a challenging, beautiful work. And yes, it’s very stagy because guess what? It’s set on a stage. That’s where theater lives. That’s where theater people live too.

‘Lesbian Space Princess’

In a year when Pixar removed all the queerness from its obviously, deeply, now-only-allegorically queer sci-fi coming-of-age story “Elio,” Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese came to the rescue. Their debut feature “Lesbian Space Princess” stars Shabana Azeez (“The Pitt”) as Saira, the repressed princess of Clitopolis, whose badass intergalactic mercenary girlfriend Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel) just left her. When Kiki is kidnapped by Straight White Maliens, who need Saira’s magical labrys to power their 100% literal “chick magnet,” the princess embarks on an epic quest to find her inner strength and, of course, find herself.

As you may have noticed, a lot of the jokes are extremely obvious. But Hobbs’ and Varghese’s hilarious Australian indie is a welcome a cathartic contrast to the American animation industry, which is often too cowardly to reference queerness at all. Besides, it’s extremely funny. “Lesbian Space Princess” is a brash and wonderful adventure, infused with the best qualities of 21st century kids shows and risky counterculture, which deserves a much bigger audience.

‘Misericordia’

Alain Guiraudie’s dry, bleak comedy “Misericordia” tells the story of Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), who returns home for the funeral of his old employer, and gets roped into sexual intrigue. The widow wants him physically, her son thinks they’re already sleeping together, and when a fateful confrontation leads to a mysterious disappearance, Jérémie finds himself forced to cater to many romantic advances, from multiple people, just to stay out of prison.

“Misericordia” is, on the surface, an old-fashioned thriller about murder and shame, but writer/director Guiraudie is only half interested in building conventional Hitchcockian tension. Jérémie’s real problem isn’t getting away with a crime, it’s this small town where keeping a secret comes with strings, in which a queer antihero like Jérémie is forced to make terrible compromises and give away his agency. The noose doesn’t tighten because the police are closing in — although they very much are — it’s because some people prey on the queer community and will take any excuse to sink in their teeth.

‘The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo’

Writer/director Diego Céspedes’s lovely and tragic and, again, lovely drama takes place in 1982, in a Chilean mining town. Twelve-year-old Lidia (Tamara Cortés) is living on the outskirts in a drag bar, long since abandoned by her birth parents, raised by a group of queens who will go actually go to bat for her. Literally. When Lidia is bullied by local boys, her queer adopted mom and aunties drop everything they’re doing because it’s officially time to kick ass.

That’s very sweet, but AIDS has come to Lidia’s village, and her found family is the target of local rage, leading to a bizarre encounter where their oppressors — who inexplicably think it’s transmitted by eye contact — force them to wear blindfolds and walk around with a handler. There’s a horror movie in that concept, but “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” has other plans, and eventually finds its way back around to melancholic sweetness. The laughter of a loving home, stained with tears.

‘Peter Hujar’s Day’

Ben Whishaw is hypnotic, and sometimes hypnotically dull (that’s a good thing), in Ira Sachs’ ironically-fascinating talkie. And by “talkie” I mean it’s just two people talking, in the vein of “My Dinner with Andre” and “Southside With You.” Whishaw plays acclaimed photographer Peter Hujar, as he’s interviewed by writer Linda Rosenkrantz, played by Rebecca Hall, about what he did yesterday. Everything he did yesterday. Down to the tiniest detail.

The original audio for the interview was lost, so Ira Sachs’ film is a recreation, and it has no higher ambition than to make you feel like you’re really there, listening to two fascinating people talk about their recent interaction with Allen Ginsberg the same way the rest of us talk about that one boring guy from work (we all have one and you know it). Along the way they opine about how hard it is to make a living as an artist and how expensive all the basic amenities are getting. If they only knew how bad that was going to get.

There’s a transcendent quality to “Peter Hujar’s Day,” not in spite of its dullness but because of it, because these are the minutiae to which we are rarely privy in anyone else’s lives, certainly not the celebrities, but which we are hyper aware of in our own daily existence. Life finds a way to be mundane no matter how remarkable our life turns out to be. Add to that the inherent sadness of Peter Hujar, who was not long for this world, and you’ve got a film whose narrow focus reveals wonders.

‘Queens of the Dead’

Tina Romero, the daughter of zombie visionary George A. Romero, joins the family business with the head-turning “Queens of the Dead,” starring Katy O’Brien (“Love Lies Bleeding”) as the owner of a drag club which is, as you can probably imagine, attacked by the living dead.

It’s as good a concept for a zom-com as any, but Romero and her wonderful cast make it more than a lark. Films like “Night of the Living Dead” — and there are a lot of films like “Night of the Living Dead” — use the concept of a zombie apocalypse to reveal the frayed human connections that barely hold together a fully-functioning society. Remove social contracts, remove the rule of law, and put every character in panic mode and you always find that people are the biggest monsters of all.

Except, of course, in “Queens of the Dead,” which argues that when the chips are down, the queer community sticks the f*** together, damn it. Even the drag zombies aren’t all that far gone, and are just as interested in keeping up with their social media feeds as they are in eating human flesh.

“Queens of the Dead” is a deathly delight, a kitschy midnight movie in the making, and a vital reimagining of the whole undead allegory. Zomb-ay… you stay.