The 11 Best LGBTQ+ Movies of 2023

By Jason Adams | Film | December 30, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | December 30, 2023 |

2023 was a banner year for queer cinema, meaning that even beyond the quality of the movies - which was itself banner—it finally began to feel like all of those letters and every stripe of the rainbow were getting represented right there among the very best. There was intersex political maneuvering, black gay civil rights leaders, lesbian pulp anti-heroines, and an animated trans hero kicking cartoon butt just a button push away on Netflix. We fell in love, we became famous wrestlers, we fought football players and Patty Clarkson. Or in the case of everyone’s favorite bisexual drama queen we battled the ride-up of our extremely expensive crop-top as our lover’s parents stared in horror over the Niçoise. All of us were everywhere—strangers, bottoms, and mutts oh my—and so it only feels right to highlight the year’s best in queer cinema. So let’s with a Top 11—a very queer number for a very queer subject.

11 Cassandro

Gael Garcia Bernal gave one of the year’s great performances in Roger Ross Williams’ bio-pic of Saúl Armendáriz, the Mexican wrestler who began his career as the lucha lubre called El Topo but who only found success once he found his inner flamboyance and turned exótico, renaming himself Cassandro and becoming an icon to the entire culture. Saúl’s tormented relationship with his mother—who he uses for a lot of Cassandro’s visual inspiration—is the heart of the movie. But him finding himself torn between Raúl Castillo’s closeted family man and the pillowy lips of Bad Bunny make up the movie’s burning loins, and you best prepare to get scorched.

Cassandro is now streaming on Prime Video.

10 Every Body

RBG documentarian Julie Cohen sets her sights here on three members of the intersex community—actor River Gallo, political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel, and Ph.D. student Sean Saifa Wall—and then details each of their journeys toward embracing their fullest selves in this moving, funny, and extraordinarily educational doc. And the three distinct paths they’ve taken to get in front of Cohen’s camera have been fascinatingly different, but Cohen masterfully weaves them together—along with the storied and difficult history and the scientific meaning of all those criss-crossing chromosomes—into what feels like a definitive portrait of an extremely under-represented group of people. I’ve been screaming “We’re here, we’re queer” for decades but I still felt like I learned so much from this film.

Every Body is now streaming on Prime Video.

9 Rotting in the Sun

A deliciously nasty satire of gay narcissism from Nasty Baby writer-director Sebastián Silva, who here plays (one imagines, or hopes) a variation of himself who becomes hopelessly entangled with the social-media “star” Jordan Firstman. And this all while while his overworked and underappreciated housekeeper Vero (a brilliantly funny Catalina Saavedra, who also starred in Silva’s film The Maid) scurries around in the margins trying, and failing spectacularly, to clean up Silva’s thoughtless messes. A ruthlessly acidic takedown of modern gay culture, or as I said in my review, “this feels like a Todd Solondz-directed episode of Search Party, just with a whole lot of explicit slobbering on cocks sprinkled on top for good measure.”

Rotting in the Sun is now streaming on MUBI.

8 Nimona

Thanks to the folks at Walt Disney we almost never got to see Nick Bruno and Troy Quane’s spectacularly entertaining animated adventure, because the Mouse House who’s happy to hold a Gay Day in the land of Don’t Say Gay every year became queasy about the top-to-bottom queer content Nimona contained. They shuttered the animation house behind the Ice Age franchise because of it! But thankfully the movie—an adaptation of the 2015 graphic novel by ND Stevenson, Nimona tells the story of two hot knights in love (voiced by Riz Ahmed and Eugene Lee Yang) and the titular shapeshifter (Chloë Grace Moretz) who helps them find their way back to one another while also coming to terms with their own ability to be whatever the hell they want to be in this world—finally made its way into the light of day via Netflix in its final, triumphant form.

Nimona is now streaming on Netflix.

7 Monica

Two more woefully under-sung performances of the year belong to Trace Lysette and Patricia Clarkson in this family drama, which sees the title character coming home to care for her dying mother even though they’ve been estranged ever since Monica ran away as a teenager and transitioned. Director Andrea Pallaoro (who co-wrote the script with Orlando Tirado) examines with great nuance the line between self-care and selfishness that most queer people have to thread themselves in their process of finding their genuine selves, and how that clumsy undertaking can leave victims, of even our own one-time victimizers, in their wake.

Monica is now streaming on AMC+.

6 Kokomo City

Lensed in stunning black-and-white filmmaker D. Smith’s doc about trans-women sex-workers and the dudes who love them is one of the most visually arresting movies of 2023—it feels dropped out of the low-budget indie-scene of the 90s a la Go Fish or Clerks. But the unapologetic discussions of what their jobs entail, meaning both the good and the bad but most certainly the explicit, couldn’t have come out of any other moment in time than now. Still the time-capsule feel does in its own way make this film feel like a callback to Jennie Livingston’s 1990 classic on the same subject Paris is Burning, with Kokomo’s centralizing of the women and their own words proving a bit of a sharp answer to the questions that previous movie raised.

Kokomo City is available to rent on Prime.

5 Bottoms

The funniest movie of the year reunited Shiva Baby filmmaker Emma Seligman with her brilliant star Rachel Sennott for a movie that couldn’t feel more different from that earlier collaboration… except for all the laughs that is. But where Shiva Baby was all excruciating awkwardness, Bottoms is bombastic and broad, a reworking of the well-worn high-school-comedy template about dumb horny boys trying to fuck the cheerleaders to now show, well, dumb horny girls trying to fuck the cheerleaders this time. That’s called progress! Co-starring legend-in-the-making Ayo Edebiri, Bottoms was the hardest I laughed in a movie theater this year.

Bottoms is now streaming on MGM+.

4 Saltburn

Emerald Fennell’s sophomore follow-up to Promising Young Woman has proved (liked that earlier work) divisive, and not just because of the provocative territories her stories tend to storm into. Some people apparently find her work shallow, derivative of the past provocateurs she’s clearly cribbing from. I am not among those people, but they exist and I wish them joy in their lives. For me Saltburn is all horned up about eating the rich, literally and figuratively, and then fucking their graves for good measure, and I personally don’t know how you can’t get onboard with that. It’s a blasted good time is what it is, most especially in Barry Keoghan’s barn-stormer of a performance—as I said in my review he gifts us with “a delicious little pervert who explodes the queer villain archetype outward, turning rage into baroque poetry; Oliver is sex and fury consummated in Keoghan’s lithe satyric turn. (He puts the Pan in pansexual.)”

Saltburn is now streaming on Prime Video.

3 Eileen

If there was a King and a Queen of this year’s Queer Prom I’d crown Barry Keoghan’s Oliver Quick and Thomasin McKenzie’s Eileen Dunlop as the best queers in show - they’re tearing down the hetero establishment one asshole at a time. Anyway from its opening scene where McKenzie stuffs snow down her underpants to cool herself down as she watches some unsuspecting folks necking in their car onward her Eileen is the queen of repressed sexuality run amok. And that’s before the slinky blond cloud of hair called Rebecca (Anne Hathaway, vamping and camping it up) storms into her life and sends her right off the deep end. An adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel from Lady Macbeth director William Oldroyd, this is twisty sleaze by way of the pulp paperbacks of yore—the overripe lesbian noir that Todd Haynes’ classy Carol skirted around.

Eileen is now in theaters.

2 Passages

The messiest of messes and we couldn’t get enough. Ira Sachs’ Passages is like staring at the sexiest car wreck—even those freaks in David Cronenberg’s Crash would blush at the disaster Franz Rogowski’s Tomas makes of his life and the lives of his embattled amores Martin (Ben Whishaw) and Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). From my review: “The film, like Tomas himself, feels like a bit of a taunt—-perhaps a challenge is a nicer way to put it—-in how it dares us to witness someone at their most wildly, vividly unlikeable, and scrounge up some understanding. But then I think for anybody who’s ever been in a toxic relationship—-and my guess is that’s most people, unfortunately—-this spectacle feels honest, lived in, excruciatingly true.”

Passages is now streaming on MUBI.

1 All of Us Strangers

Topping both this list and my own personal list of films of the year comes this Andrew Haigh joint that’s all about what getting topped by Paul Mescal will do to a man—it’ll break you right into pieces, it will! In all seriousness, Andrew Scott gives the heart-shattering performance of the year here as Adam, a writer who starts unearthing his own past until he can’t distinguish it from the present. Very much a Christmas movie in that there’s an actual scene set at Christmas but more importantly that it’s a story of a haunted man being visited by his past, present, and future, while trying to reconcile them all within himself to find some way, any way, forward. (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are also on hand absolutely killing it.)

From my review: “That Haigh’s film dances with all of this darkness while weaving its magic spell, sexy and funny and strange as can be, is an astonishment. The chemistry between these four actors, each and every one of them easing out the most exhaustive truth from their every line-reading and every impossible glance, is an astonishment. All of Us Strangers is, dare I say, an astonishment. Small and fine and as big and endless as the stars and the night sky.”

All of Us Strangers is now in theaters.

And a few worthy runners-up: Strange Way of Life, Knock at the Cabin, A Prince, Will-o’-the-Wisp, Of An Age, Mutt, Monster, Afire, and Rustin