The Best Movies of 2023 According to Autostraddle Readers

As the resident cinephile on the Autostraddle TV Team, since 2020 it’s been my task to put together a list of the best queer movies of the year. It’s my greatest pleasure to watch as many queer movies as I can and then recommend my favorites to you all. It’s even better that with each passing year there has been more and more to recommend. This year my list includes over 40 movies!

But my opinion is just one opinion. I love writing about and discussing movies because I like to share my enthusiasm and because I believe criticism is an art in itself. I don’t think I’m some sort of objective incontestable voice on film. That’s why this year we decided, in addition to my list, to also hold a poll on our Instagram to find out which films you all like most!

Of course, there are limitations to this. The winners will likely skew toward films more people saw which might explain — along with difference of opinion — why my fave Mars One went out in the first round. We were also limited by the amount of poll options on Instagram and how many rounds we felt like taking on in this first experiment. It became obvious very quickly that people on the internet do not like limitations and in the future we’ll have to find a way to include every queer movie of the year or have somewhere for write-ins. I’m glad there’s enthusiasm for movies I didn’t like or movies I haven’t seen yet! All I ever want is for people to be excited about queer cinema, even if it’s different queer cinema than what is exciting me.

And now… without further ado…


The Top 10 Queer Movies of 2023 According to Autostraddle Readers:

  1. Bottoms (dir. Emma Seligman)
  2. Nimona (dir. Troy Quane, Nick Bruno)
  3. Blue Jean (dir. Georgia Oakley)
  4. May December (dir. Todd Haynes)
  5. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (dir. Aitch Alberto)
  6. Theater Camp (dir. Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman)
  7. Knock at the Cabin (dir. M. Night Shyamalan)
  8. Kokomo City (dir. D. Smith)
  9. NYAD (dir. Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi)
  10. All of Us Strangers (dir. Andrew Haigh)

Congrats to the ugly, untalented gays!!

Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri look at each other in a classroom as their peers have various shenanigans behind them

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Drew Burnett Gregory

Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She is a Senior Editor at Autostraddle with a focus in film and television, sex and dating, and politics. Her writing can also be found at Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Refinery29, Into, them, and Knock LA. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Drew Burnett has written 626 articles for us.

2 Comments

  1. I don’t get why people like Bottoms so much. I had my hopes up and wanted to like Bottoms but ended up very disappointed. In general, I don’t mind violent films and dark humor, also a little meanness can be either hot, funny or both but Bottoms was just so unnecessarily mean and violent and over the top trying to be funny without delivering. Satirical teenage cringe and being a loser baby gay both have so much potential to be funny but calling all the dark skin girls ugly and not taking sexual assault seriously etc. on top of everything else is not it for me.

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