Get ready to sob your eyes out.
11 sad LGBTQ+ movies to watch during sad girl seasonSearchlight Pictures; IFC Films; Sony Pictures ClassicsSometimes you just want to wallow in your sadness.
The skies are cloudy, the weather is cold, and the days are short: it’s officially sad girl season. Sometimes the best way to make it through the sadness is to go deeper into it by listening to sad music, cuddling under a pile of blankets, and watching sad movies.
Unfortunately, for LGBTQ+ people, historically, sad movies about us have involved hate crimes, murder, and suicide, and that might be a little too dark even for those who want to spend time in the darkness.
Here are 11 LGBTQ+ movies that will make you cry, but won’t make you want to die yourself.
All of Us Strangers
2023’s All of Us Strangers features beautifully moving performances by Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal and is sure to pull at your heartstrings. Scott stars as Adam, a lonely British writer who goes on a journey of love and healing when he starts sleeping with his neighbor (Mescal) and seeing the ghosts of his parents who died when he was a child.
Now playing in select theaters.
Call Me by Your Name
Call Me by Your Name has one of the most classic sad endings of any film. Following 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) as he experiences his first gay love while spending the summer in Italy with his parents and one of his father’s 24-year-old graduate students, CMBYN has plenty of fun and sexiness, but it also packs an emotional punch that will leave even the toughest of us in tears.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour
Sometimes the most powerful love affairs aren’t meant to last, and that’s the case with Blue Is the Warmest Colour, a 2013 French film about an intense relationship between two young women.
Monica
Trace Lysette dazzles in this quietly powerful film about a trans woman coming home to help take care of her ailing mother who kicked her out for being trans. The film takes you on an emotional journey that covers everything from family to forgiveness to finding your place — and accepting people for who they are.
Maestro
Bradley Cooper’s epic biopic about legendary composer Leonard Bernstein features plenty of triumph, but also plenty of tragedy. Bernstein’s love life was full of ups and downs including infidelity, heartbreaks, and death.
Carol
While The Price of Salt is considered one of the first lesbian novels with a “happy ending,” there’s a lot of tragedy in the story. Carol and Therese not only have to deal with the homophobia of the time they lived in, but Carol is going through a difficult divorce where she is threatened with losing access to her child because she’s gay.
Supernova
Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth star in this profound film about life, death, and love. The two great actors play a gay couple who has been together for twenty years who decide to go on a road trip across England when one of them is diagnosed with early onset dementia.
Our Son
This film stars Billy Porter and Luke Evans as a gay couple who have been married for 13 years and are raising a son together when their relationship starts to reach its breaking point. As the two move closer to a divorce, they must fight for custody of their child and figure out what’s most important in their lives.
The Pass
This 2016 film stars Russell Tovvey and Arinze Kene as two English footballers who had a sexual encounter on the night before the first Champions League match of their careers. The film follows the next ten years of their lives and how that one night affected it all.
Passages
Passages proves how complicated love can be. It follows a gay couple, Tomas and Martin, as their marriage deteriorates. The two are dissatisfied with their lives, and when one of them sleeps with a woman that they meet at a wrap party, their relationship begins to truly fall apart.
Streaming on MUBI and available to rent on Amazon.A Single Man
Colin Firth is one of the kings of the gay drama, and he proves it again in A Single Man. The movie follows his character, George Falconer, as he prepares to kill himself eight months after his longtime partner died in a car crash.
