Hamnet leads Attitude’s pick of film reviews to brighten your January blues
Hamnet and Peter Hujar’s Day: LGBTQ+ representation in 2026 film has got off to a prideful start
By Guy Lodge
As January draws to a close, Attitude has picked out the top queer-coded films to hit UK cinemas so far in 2026. From Paul Mescal making waves in Hamnet to looking back at Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, these films have set the bar high for LGBTQ+ representation on the big screen this year.
Hamnet – starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and Zac Wishart
Finally arriving on British screens in a golden cloud of awards hype, this take-no-prisoners tearjerker sees Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao rebounding from the Marvel mediocrity of Eternals – but it’s hardly a return to familiar territory for her. Far from the rugged modern Americana of her films The Rider and Nomadland, her latest sees her vividly recreate the weathered textures of rural Elizabethan England, for the speculative story of how one of William Shakespeare’s best-loved plays – the clue’s in the title – came to the stage.
Paul Mescal plays the Bard with his signature potent melancholy, but he’s not the focal figure here. That would be his wife Agnes (or Anne, as most history books have it), a wild child of nature turned burdened, abandoned homemaker played by Jessie Buckley in a performance of such exquisite, raw-nerved emotional intensity that you may as well place your Best Actress bets right now. Mostly unfolding some distance away from Shakespeare’s exploits in the theatre world, it tells the story of their initial ardent courtship, before the mood shifts to discontent as Agnes is left largely alone to raise their three children, and to outright despair after their only son, Hamnet, dies at the age of 11.
As a study of the interior devastation wrought by grief – in wave upon wave of anger, incomprehension and displaced love – it’s vivid and unsparing, so richly felt that you forgive its sporadic moments of overwriting and on-the-nose expression. (Even Mescal can’t quite pull off a scene presenting the origin of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy.) It’s at its best and most searing when Zhao’s direction matches the earthy, unmannered honesty of Buckley’s performance: the Irish star has been one to watch for several years now, and here enters the ranks of the greats.
Peter Hujar’s Day – starring Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw
You can always count on American director Ira Sachs (Keep the Lights On, Passages) for casually sensual explorations of urban queer living, and that holds true in this first venture into biographical territory. It’s a witty, bittersweet, finely detailed day-in-the-life portrait of trailblazing gay photographer Peter Hujar, as he whiles away an ordinary day with a writer friend, musing on art and sex and substance abuse as she records him.
Sachs’s script is based on those transcripts, lending the film a quasi-documentary intimacy, heightened by the louche, languid naturalism of Ben Whishaw’s superb performance as Hujar.
Queer cult-classic
The Watermelon Woman – starring Cheryl Dunye, Guinevere Turner and Valarie Walker
Cheryl Dunye’s smart, raucous comedy was a trailblazer back in 1996 – it was the first feature film ever directed by an out Black lesbian – and still feels bracingly free and forward-thinking. Dunye herself stars as a young video store clerk in Philadelphia, attempting to make a documentary about unsung Black women on screen, all while negotiating the mores and taboos of queer dating.
It tackles any number of substantial social issues with a light, wry touch, attentive to the rhythms of everyday conversation and sexuality. Nearly 30 years on, its cultural significance is self-evident, but it never feels self-important.
Available to stream on Mubi.
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