Girls Like Girls

6/19/2026

It’s genuinely heartening to see how much LGBTQ+ cinema has progressed over the part 30 years. When the genre was new, most of its releases fell into a limited handful of storylines, which, though groundbreaking at the time, have since been surpassed by numerous other works that have moved beyond the basics. And that’s why the debut feature from writer-director Hayley Kiyoko is such a huge disappointment. The film is a rather uninspired throwback more typical of pictures released in this genre in the 1980s, making the material seem quite dated compared to more contemporary offerings. Even though this story takes place in a small town in the first decade of the new millennium – a setting somewhat less progressive than others at that time and certainly much more so than compared to today – i