December 11, 2020 · By spencer
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The best gay movies from 2020 you need to watch
With 2020 soon behind us—we hope—let’s look back on the year’s best gay films worth watching in 2021. This year’s picks range from coming of age stories to past memories and finally to a pair of films that examine aging and dementia.
Falling
John (Viggo Mortensen) lives in California with his partner, Eric (Terry Chen), and their daughter, Mónica (Gabby Velis), far from the traditional rural life he left behind years ago. John’s father, Willis (Lance Henriksen), a headstrong man from a bygone era, lives alone on the isolated farm where John grew up. Willis is in the early stages of dementia making running the farm on his own increasingly difficult, so John brings him to stay at his California home so that he and his sister Sarah (Laura Linney) might help him find a place near them to relocate to. Unfortunately, their best intentions ultimately run up against Willis’s adamant refusal to change his way of life in the slightest.
Falling is a powerful film about the relationship between fathers and sons in a changing world, although we may think the story is mainly about John, it is only in the sense of how he fits into his father’s life story. Henriksen is amazing in the role, bringing his years of acting, wisdom and grit to the character. Falling started the year at Sundance back in February when we had no idea of the year ahead. It is also Mortensen’s debut feature and first directing project.
Supernova
The second film on our list also deals with aging and dementia. In Supernova the dynamic is between two partners of 20 years played skillfully by Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth, and it’s layered with struggling visions between their present and future together. The film is beautifully made and the screen chemistry between Tucci and Firth is fantastic. Highly anticipated, I snapped up when it was finally released, and it easily makes the list of best gay films from 2020.
In this camping road trip across England Sam (Firth) and Tusker (Tucci) visit family, friends and place from their youth as they grapple with Tusker’s approaching early-onset dementia. Now their time together is more important than ever as they both want to enjoy the freedom while it lasts. As the trip progresses, however, their ideas for the future clash, secrets come out, and their love for each other is tested as never before. In the end they must confront the question of what it means to love one another in the face of Tusker’s illness.
Rent or buy Supernova on Apple TV
Boys in the Band
Set in 1968 New York, the story revolves around a birthday party which includes a surprise guest, and a drunken party game that leaves seven gay friends reckoning with unspoken feelings and buried truths.
Exclusive to Netflix, the 2020 version of this classic gay play brings the recent stage cast to the small screen and wider audience, 50 years after the previous screen adaptation. The all-star gay cast is impressive, but more so given how far we’ve come in 50 years. While I will keep kicking myself for not going to New York and seeing this stage production, the next best thing is this movie adaptation. It does allow us to get closer to the characters without losing the magic of seeing all the actors react in the moment, especially when seated far back in the theatre.
Watch The Boys in the Band on Netflix. Also worth watching after the feature, the champion documentary The Boys in the Band: Something Personal.
Summer of 85
When Alexis (Félix Lefebvre) capsizes off the coast of Normandy, David (Benjamin Voisin) comes to his rescue and soon opens the younger boy’s eyes to a new horizon of friendship, art, and sexual bliss. David’s worldly demeanor and Jewish heritage deliver an ardent jolt to Alexis’s traditional, working-class upbringing. After Alexis begins working at the seaside shop owned by David’s mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), the two lovers steal every possible moment for a fugitive kiss, a motorcycle ride, or a trip to the cinema. Their relationship is soon rocked by a host of challenges, including an unexpected sexual rival (Philippine Velge) and the teenaged hormones that lead young people to make such terrible decisions.
Based on Aidan Chambers’s groundbreaking LGBT young adult novel Dance on My Grave (from 1982), Summer of 85 (Été 85) is a sexy, nostalgic reverie of first love and its consequences from François Ozon, from one of France’s most versatile filmmakers. While their summer fling lasts only six weeks, it casts a shadow over a lifetime. The lead actors are charming and wonderful together, surrounded by a setting that drips mid-80s France and paired with popular music to match.
Watch on Apple TV or Prime Video.
Funny Boy
An adaptation of Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel Funny Boy, exploring the awakening of sexual identity by a young boy named Arjie. As political tensions escalate to a boiling point between the minority Tamils and the majority Sinhalese, a young boy comes of age in a society and family that doesn’t embrace difference outside of societal norms. The film chronicles Arjie’s struggle to find balance and self-love despite the absence of empathy and understanding.
Monsoon
Kit can’t remember much of his native Vietnam. When he returns to the Land of the Golden Star for the first time in over thirty years, he takes in his local surroundings as any Western tourist would, and the environment is as exotic as the language is incomprehensible. The aim of Kit’s travels – to find a place to scatter his parents’ ashes – thus becomes part of a journey back to his roots and to the discovery of his identity, which external circumstances have rendered ambiguous and complex.
Buy or rent on Apple TV or stream on Netflix.
Breaking Fast
Mo, a practicing Muslim living in West Hollywood, is learning to navigate life post heartbreak. Enter Kal, an All-American guy who surprises Mo by offering to break fast with him during the holy month of Ramadan.