From coming-out fables and dancefloor make-outs to unsimulated sex and a madcap maternal quest, here is a feast of movies about LBGTQ+ lives
One detractor called it “a Shawshank Redemption for progressive millennials”. But the force of Céline Sciamma’s lesbian love story about an artist and her unwitting sitter on a remote island in 18th-century Brittany is undeniable. As is the integrity of its central dynamic, stripped of power imbalances, hierarchies – and men.
A low-budget, high-kitsch, torn-from-the-headlines football fantasy about a Ronaldo-esque football star who hallucinates giant pekingese puppies frolicking on the pitch whenever he scores. Throw in a cross-dressing refugee subplot, lesbian spies and a far-right cloning conspiracy and you have a goofy and irrepressible testament to intersectionality.
Jane Schoenbrun became an A24 sensation with I Saw the TV Glow in 2024, but it is her previous film, a bare-bones chiller about an online horror game, that remains her most original work. Less instantly legible as a trans allegory than her follow-up, perhaps, but all the more disquieting for that.
Veteran Canadian provocateur Bruce LaBruce turns Pasolini’s 1968 Theorem into a radical rage against anti-immigrant rhetoric. A gooey Black alien washes up on the banks of the Thames ready to seduce the five members of a London bourgeois household from patriarch to maid. The sex scenes aren’t simulated. Let’s pray the coprophagy is.
