The best LGBTQ films of 2024 – from All of Us Strangers to Love Lies Bleeding

Mark our words: next year will be the gayest Academy Awards on record.

Indeed, among the most hotly-tipped films for the 2025 Oscars – which return on 3 March – are several overtly LGBTQ in theme, while many feature real-life LGBTQ actors bringing lived-in authenticity to their characters. (Most notably Karla Sofía Gascón in Emilia Pérez, who could make history as the first publicly trans woman to get a Best Actress nod.)

Here, we do a deep dive into 12 of our favourites. (Special mentions, by the way, to Conclave, The Room Next Door and Babygirl.)

Will & Harper 

Credit where it’s due: Netflix served a masterclass in trans-themed content with this deceptively simple documentary. In it, Elf icon Will Ferrell and his old Saturday Night Live work wife Harper Steele embark on a road trip across America after the latter’s later life transition.

Fuelled by Ferrell’s whip-smart humour, and elevated by the at once heartbreaking vulnerability and steely resolve of Steele, their intimate, easygoing dynamic is a joy to behold. It’s a prime example of mass media potential to change hearts and minds, and a gold standard in unforced straight allyship.

Watch our interview with Ferrell and Steele here.

Emilia Pérez

Netflix tried a rather different tack with Emilia Pérez, in which music, choreography, crime and comedy collide across an international shoot encompassing thousands of extras. It’s the most improbable streaming bonanza of the decade: a project just bonkers enough to tempt Selena Gomez to pause pop star duties and prompt Zoe Saldana to abandon Avatar/Avengers popcorn queen status, all in deference to the Oscar-tipped Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays our titular drug lord-turned-Mother Theresa figure.

Some already despise how such an uncompromising portrait of such an unsavoury character is poised to be the first trans-themed film to sweep awards season in years. But there’s no denying the authenticity, or the expansive, multifaceted force behind Gascón’s performance, who presents the fullness of a trans journey like few before her.

Read our interview with Karla Sofía Gascón here.

Layla 

Bilal Hasna is magnetic in Attitude columnist Amrou Al-Kadhi’s debut feature, as a drag artist exploring identity having broken free of a conservative Muslim background – only to try on a different ‘straightjacket’ of sorts upon falling for a sweet but boring ‘Clapham gay’-type.

The film’s analysis of gradually emerging relationship incompatibility neatly captures the nuances of human relationships, while a wider cast of irrepressible East London queers feels extraordinarily true to life. Meanwhile, a moment involving a stiletto unpacks power dynamics more effectively than all the 50 Shades films combined, and might just be the most memorable sex scene on this list.

Read director Amrou Al-Kadhi’s Attitude column about taking Layla to Sundance here.

Wicked

With an overblown soundtrack and otherworldly visuals to make Avatar weep, Wicked was always going to be camp. But when we say The Wizard of Oz prequel is the queerest blockbuster we’ve ever seen, it’s no exaggeration. You could cut this film open and it would have ‘gay’ running through it like a stick of rock

Just look at the queertastic cast. There’s Jonathan Bailey bringing palpable bisexual energy to Fiyero; Bronwyn James and Bowen Yang leapfrogging gay best friend cliches to instead serve as “Glinda’s publicists”, as they recently told Attitude. As for Cynthia Erivo, she turbocharges her ‘othered’ Bad Witch of the West Elphaba with raw queer energy like only one of the most talented actors of the decade can. Even Ariana has alluded to Glinda ‘shipping’ her BFF, leading one to wonder just how bold the follow-up might be.

Check out Attitude’s interview with Cynthia and Ariana here.

Drift

Cynthia captured Elphaba’s penchant for “flying off the handle” to operatic perfection, but the ever-versatile star shifted gear entirely for this soulful drama, charting the immigrant experience of Jaqueline, an incidentally queer Liberian refugee who we find penniless on a Greek island.

Playing Jaqueline as a quiet woman drained of spirit, Cynthia’s restrained performance – so too the charming Alia Shawkat, turning down her larger-than-life charisma as Jaqueline’s equally unassuming love interest – chimes with the film’s name, as does the languid pacing. Made on a shoestring budget with a fraction of Wicked‘s dramatic excesses, Drift moves to the beat of its own gentle drum, ultimately packing an emotional punch you won’t forget.

Unicorns

As a straight man contemplates his sexuality, the dragtastic object of his affection considers her gender: such is the elegant ballet – or is it a pulverising boxing match? – at play in this fascinating romantic drama, which makes a pretty convincing case for labelless fluidity as a future frontier for the LGBTQ community.

Come for Jason Patel and former Attitude cover star Ben Hardy’s off-the-scale chemistry – rom-com cute meets 90s erotic thriller sexy – but stay for the intellectually stimulating yet humanly accessible discourse around queerness.

Read our interview with Unicorns‘ Ben Hardy and Jason Patel here.

Problemista

What do you get when you mix the surrealism of David Lynch with the turbocharged soap opera of The Real Housewives – when the person doing the mixing is a queer 30-something who grew up through the Disney Renaissance and went on to be a writer for Saturday Night Life? The magical gay fever dream that is Problemista, directed, written and produced by Julio Torres, that’s what. Like Drift, Promblemista is a victory for incidental queerness, folding its protagonist’s sexuality into the batter of this eccentric rainbow cake of a movie. The film’s engine is the Will & Grace-adjacent platonic relationship between a man and a woman, played by Torres and Tilda Swinton. More of this, please.

Problemista follows Alejandro, an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador struggling to navigate the US immigration system, in need of a sponsor to stay in the country. Oscar-winner Swinton plays Elizabeth, the furious pink-haired dragon of an art critic (and titular ‘problemista’) Alejandro finds himself working for in NYC – and, for his sins, growing to adore. Perfection.

Read our interview with Problemista director Julio Torres here.

Queer

A magnetic Daniel Craig is a shoo-in for a Best Actor Oscar nomination after his work in Luca Guadagnino’s latest sumptuous tale of “unsynchronised” man-on-man love. Based on the William S. Burroughs novella of the same name, the film studies a US expat who strikes up an intense relationship with a younger man, Eugene (Drew Starkey) in the tolerant, bohemian hotspot of Mexico City in the 1950s.

Guadagnino’s trademark lush visuals are out in force, and the director scores a surreal sucker punch of a scene when Lee and Eugene find intense, albeit fleeting connection deep in the jungle. But what drives this film is Craig’s wildly charismatic and tragicomic creation, as well as some thrillingly bold eroticism. Snowballing is back!

Watch our interview with Daniel and Queer director Luca Guadagnino here.

Love Lies Bleeding

When a movie grips you from its opening frame, you know you’re in for a wild ride. Love Lies Bleeding kicks off with a man plunging in slow motion into a red-lit rocky crevice. It’s one hell of a shot, indicative of the showy cinematography to come. Director Rose Glass’s last film, the bananas religious-themed horror Saint Maud (2020), framed the seaside town of Scarborough as hell’s waiting room. Here, the desert town of Albuquerque, New Mexico is a tempting oasis of neon-lit vice, populated with surly, morally ambiguous characters whose desires fill the starlit sky. 

This is outlandish entertainment exploring themes of addiction and domestic abuse without descending into trauma porn; a lesbian love story that flirts with stereotypical tragedy before plumping for transcendence. Glass spins tonal plates like a pro, dispensing with the monolithic terror of Saint Maude to create organised, kaleidoscopic chaos: body horror, crime caper, gritty drama, erotic thriller – it’s all here. Above all, this is a absurdist gay pantomime; I half expected the sandblasted cast of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to rock up and meet the girls for a beer.

All of Us Strangers

He made a perfect gay film with 2011’s Weekend, and director extraordinaire did it again with Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal-starring All of Strangers, which goes darker and deeper than its predecessor, unlocking the deeply repressed pain of generations of men who thought the trauma of growing up gay was behind him.

Mixing naturalistic acting with supernatural storytelling, the movie’s overwhelming melancholia is tempered by Scott’s sweet-natured turn as a middle-aged man reckoning with his relationship with his parents, and Mescal’s playful, intoxicating sexiness as the guy next door offering distraction but battling his own demons.

Read interview with All of Us Strangers star Andrew Scott here.

I Saw the TV Glow

Jack Whitehall in Jungle Cruise, Josh Gad in Beauty and the Beast; there should be a special Razzie for films that talk the talk on queer content, only to offer something so insultingly thin, you miss it in the blink of an eye. Then again, from the meta-commentary of Bros to the smug, tone-deaf moralising of Stonewall, we’re not always enamoured by the opposite approach, either.

Step forward 90s-set psychological horror I Saw the TV Glow, about two moody teens whose shared obsession with a Buffy-style TV show named The Pink Opaque follows them into adulthood. (God help you if you were the star of this film; the TV show in question your teen fave, and so on. Mine was Absolutely Fabulous, FYI.) It’s the first film in living memory to turn subtlety around LGBTQ themes – specifically, in this case, gender-diversity – into a super power.

This writer, despite being a fairly experienced journalist specialising in queer cinema, was one of many who initially failed to join the dots, declaring on first viewing: “How was that an LGBTQ film?!” Not that I was ever disappointed, so throughly intoxicated was I by the film’s grungy score and trippy visual language, all eerie neon colours and grainy analogue references. Not to mention the transfixing intensity of Brigette Lundy-Paine and Justice Smith: two TV addicted outsiders whose square eyes take them full-on Alice Through the Looking Glass, or Samara from The Ring in reverse.

I consumed the film with inexplicable fascination anyway, allowing its wider themes of teen alienation and the soul-destroying consequences of a life lived inauthentically, to seep in. When the film’s message finally clicked on second viewing, I was forever changed.

I’d call it a Trojan Horse effect, but fear that would cast director Jane Schoenbrun as manipulative, and besides, on third viewing, its queerness was plain as day. For this viewer, Glow‘s transness is both hyper-specific and metaphorical, making it potentially accessible for anyone, prompting questions about the parts of ourselves we really ought to accept, and pronto, because life is short. “It’s eggs cracking after eggs cracking,” concurred the film’s nonbinary star told Brigette Lundy-Paine in an interview with Attitude earlier this year. It really is.

Despite modest success on arrival, feverish word-of-mouth enthusiasm has seen Glow‘s influence, particularly among those whose relationship with their queerness in unreconciled, grow exponentially. It’s already a cult LGBTQ classic, but for our money, it could become to horror what The Shawshank Redemption or Amélie are to gritty dramas and romantic comedies – a universally respected example of its genre that no one saw coming. And one that just happens to be queer.

Read our interview with I Saw the TV Glow’s Brigette Lundy-Paine here.