Rebellion, Revelation, and Rapture: NewFest 2025 Proves Queer Cinema Is Thriving

For New Yorkers, the fall film festival season is synonymous with the New York Film Festival, which takes over Lincoln Center for two weeks in late September and early October. However, NewFest, the city’s expertly programmed and smoothly-oiled LGBTQ+ film festival, often follows right on the heels of NYFF (they even share a weekend). NewFest is the opposite of NYFF in many regards. Here, you won’t find a barrage of highly anticipated independent films from well-known directors instead, and excitingly, almost every film on the lineup is a discovery.

This year, the festival’s theme centered on “rebellion” and its official tagline was “Watch Films. Fight back.” The slogan is certainly fitting for a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under direct, horrifying threat in so many different ways. Simultaneously, this year’s festival also felt like a celebration and an honoring of the bold, beautiful stories that queer and trans filmmakers have been able to craft and release over the past year.

NewFest often has some of the most exciting festival programming that New York has to offer, and that certainly felt the case this year. You’re perhaps the most likely to catch a film you’ve never heard of, and more often than not, it’s going to be worth your time (and dime).

Perhaps my favorite film of the festival was Siobhan McCarthy’s coming-of-age comedy She’s the He, which follows two high school boys who pretend to be trans in order to improve their chances with girls. The only problem: One of them realizes she isn’t pretending. It’s almost too easy to compare McCarthy’s film to Emma Seligman’s Bottoms; they’re both rowdy and genre-bending high school comedies that deliver a wild and raucous third act. But, the themes on identity and belonging that lurk beneath this film’s bold exterior are nuanced, thoughtful and heartwarming, making it all the more enjoyable and unforgettable.

Fresh from this year’s Sundance, Mathias Broe’s Sauna is a soft yet uneven look at a relationship and personal growth. The Danish film centers on Johan (Magnus Juhl Andersen), a lonely young man who works at an all-male sauna and spends his free time engaging in meaningless hookups. Through one of these hookup apps, he meets William (Nina Rask), a trans man. The film charts their love story amidst Johan’s struggle to commit to a relationship. Broe’s focus is intimate yet scattered. While the filmmaker’s good intentions are clearly visible, Johan’s growth throughout the film feels sadly underdeveloped, leaving the ending — and the film as a whole — a bit abrupt and unsatisfying.

Elliot Tuttle’s Blue Film might be the festival’s most difficult-to-watch film; Tuttle even noted during his introduction that he was expecting to see some walkouts during the film (there were few, in the end). The film follows a camboy — a male performer who publishes webcam photographs or videos of himself for money — who goes to one of his viewers’ houses for a private appointment (there’s a $50,000 fee waiting for him there). There, he discovers a disturbing truth about his client. What starts (and continues) as a disturbing premise morphs into a complex exploration of shame and reckoning with the past. The film is set within the confines of one house, so to nitpick, it feels a tad too stage-like. And, even in the film’s brief 78 minutes, the characters and themes lose their complexity, becoming repetitive by the film’s end.

This year’s International Centerpiece film, Brazilian filmmakers Marcio Reolon’s and Filipe Matzembacher’s Night Stage, is a political erotic thriller that packs less of a punch than it promises. The film tracks an illicit relationship between an emerging theater actor and a politician running for a mayoral position. Despite its intense plot and some steamy scenes here and there, Reolon’s and Matzembacher’s film is surprisingly low stakes and frictionless. The main relationship isn’t given enough time or space to develop, and the film’s focus feels surprisingly scattered for such a tight story like this. The first half of the film is sluggish, and by the time its intensity spikes, it’s far too late. If only the entire film were like its last, frenetic 10 minutes, perhaps it would have been more effective.

While I’ll forever appreciate Richard Linklater’s incredible Before trilogy, It has led to a constant stream of stale dramas where two characters meet, talk throughout the night and fall for one another. The latest offender: A Night Like This, a British-set film which follows two men who meet, talk throughout the night and fall for one another. The uninspired screenwriting, underdeveloped characters and lack of chemistry all make this night-out film a time-out film. There are ways to make some of the film’s themes effective — particularly those on loneliness and belonging — but director Liam Calvert’s unwillingness to dive into the story’s darker elements stops it from having a greater impact or, frankly, any impact at all.