A sexy and stylishly directed thriller with a genuine heat in its depiction of sexuality, thanks to some fantastic performances by both Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 23, 2025

A volatile, sensuous revenge film in which the body and its desires don’t lie.

| Sep 17, 2024

It succeeds precisely because it is gay. The film's inherent disruption of tradition speaks to the essence of queer existence, defying the rules placed before them and resisting easy categorization.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 12, 2024

From its soul-shattering performances to its raw exploration of queer life, Femme is a film that you cannot miss.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 9, 2024

there’s no simple binary in this exceptional heart-pounding thriller of broken queer men trying to exist in a broken society

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 4, 2024

Femme is tense, provocative, devastating, and best of all? Intolerably hot.

| Jul 3, 2024

Femme is both mean and tender.

| Jun 2, 2024

Up to that point, the film was ambivalent enough to be genuinely provocative. But finessing the depiction of a toxic romance can lead to some ugly places. Femme proves incapable of thinking outside of the genre box.

| Apr 23, 2024

“Femme” (2023) is as close to “The Night Porter” as any film may get in the twenty-first century, and it only brushes the hem of its garment.

| Apr 22, 2024

Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping...impress with the complexity they bring to the issue of identity, gay bashing and the closeted individuals who engage in it... a strong, stylish and sexy debut that leaves us with a punch to the gut.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 17, 2024

Within that funhouse mirror of an erotic-thriller premise, “Femme” proves to be a gorgeously mounted meditation on queer and queered performance.

| Apr 17, 2024

This steamy revenge thriller...driven by intense performances from Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and George MacKay...packs a punch despite its structural and technical raggedness.

| Original Score: B- | Apr 16, 2024

Incredibly tense and superbly acted, Femme is an outstanding debut feature from directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 15, 2024

It’s a thriller whose strengths are in its small scale, as the violence that brought two men together leads to more bloodshed and leaves both of them scarred for life.

| Apr 12, 2024

Freeman and Ping capture such a raw look at the violence of internalised homophobia, an aspect of queer life that, despite social advances over the past 60-odd years, never seems to go away.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 6, 2024

'Femme' stirs sex and romance with revenge in the charged tale of a gay man seducing the closeted punk who attacked him.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 6, 2024

...it’s easy enough to give that logic gap a pass given the power of the film’s ambivalent tensions, and of its very strong lead performances...

| Apr 5, 2024

As a thriller it absolutely works, but as a film that speaks to a very real thing, it's even better.

| Apr 5, 2024

More than simply a provocative thriller, Femme is a nervy and unflinching exploration of shame, power, and the pleasures of transgression.

| Apr 5, 2024

The uncompromising drama wrings your emotions dry and challenges your own ideas of what is right and just.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 4, 2024