Three Great Queer Movies at NYFF 2025
A New York City legend, British first-time director, and one of our most revered auteurs lead the crop of queer films at this year's New York Film Festival.
The New York Film Festival is in full swing! Staying true to the DNA of the city the films playing at the fest follow people from every walk of life. Of course, as a gay man who has called this city home for more than a decade, I gravitated towards queer films. Here are three great ones playing this fortnight.
Peter Hujar’s Day
There’s something transportive about Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, an adaptation of the book of the same name that is a transcript of a 1974 conversation between photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Winshaw) and Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). On its surface, it is an unadorned slice-of-life drama of two old friends catching up. However, Sachs, ever the mood-setter, paints a vivid yet nostalgic portrait of the 1970s bohemian East Village that we are losing every day (I say this as a current resident of the East Village).
As Peter recounts his day, which includes casual mentions of icons-in-the-making Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, you, as the viewer, start to feel like the conversation is a memory you’re slowly losing grasp of. It’s a melancholic but magical feeling that the city bore such a joyous community of creatives. It is a simple movie that at just 76 minutes, feels like both a lifetime and a dream. But like the best of dreams, more than anything, the feeling stays with you.
Pillion
Pillion, in its own special way, is a love letter to kink as brooding, mysterious dom Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) grooms lonely, good boy (not in the sexy way) Colin (Harry Melling) into his obedient sub. A bit like a BDSM Phantom Thread. It’s hot, funny, and assuredly directed by Harry Lighton who finds both fun and pain (both the good and bad kind) in Colin’s journey into the salacious. There are plenty of hilarious fish-out-of-water hijinks to be had as Colin wades into a world he knows nothing about—at one point he says “thank you” after giving a blow job like he just rang up your groceries—and that’s often when Pillion is at its most entertaining and eminently watchable.
However, what truly makes Pillion great is when it slows down to cut to the heart of its characters: Colin’s loneliness and Ray’s fear of intimacy. It doesn’t let either of them get away with the fantasy that they’re creating for themselves, even if that fantasy is a completely valid craving to satisfy. While the movie doesn’t get quite as deep or incisive to truly satiate the desire of a full character study, the journey is well worth the watch.
Blue Moon
There’s something bittersweet about Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a compact portrait of legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) on the opening night of Oklahoma! in 1943. Almost entirely confined to Sardi’s, Linklater turns what could have been a conventional biopic into a melancholy, funny chamber piece about an artist watching the world move on without him. Hart’s longtime collaborator Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) has moved on to Oscar Hammerstein II, and as the reviews for Oklahoma! begin rolling in, Hart is left to drink, gossip, flirt, and make increasingly barbed observations about art, love, and the indignities of getting older.
But beneath all the wit and theatrical bitchiness is a deeply sad portrait of queer loneliness. Hart was gay at a time when being openly gay could destroy a career, and Blue Moon finds the heartbreak in a man who could turn his feelings into some of the most enduring romantic songs of the American songbook while struggling to find that same kind of love for himself. Hawke is sensational, playing Hart as funny, vain, prickly, self-destructive, and ultimately devastatingly vulnerable. There’s something almost tragic about watching him perform his own personality for everyone around him, as if one more joke might keep the loneliness away. Linklater is less interested in the mechanics of Hart’s career than in that strange moment when an artist realizes the future has arrived without him. Blue Moon understands that sometimes heartbreak isn’t losing someone you love; it’s realizing they have already moved on while you’re still standing there, waiting for them to come back.
All of these films are playing at the 2025 New York Film Festival. More information here.