Movies Like Smear
If you loved Smear's film storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks

In a Heartbeat
A closeted boy runs the risk of being outed by his own heart after it pops out of his chest to chase down the boy of his dreams.

Alex Strangelove
Alex Truelove is on a quest to lose his virginity, an event eagerly awaited by his patient girlfriend and cheered on with welcome advice by his rowdy friends. But Alex, a super gregarious dude, is oddly unmotivated. A magical house party throws Alex into the presence of Elliot, a hunky college guy, who pegs Alex as gay and flirts hard. Alex is taken aback but after a series of setbacks on the girlfriend front he takes the plunge and learns some interesting new facts about himself.

Benjamin
Benjamin, a rising star filmmaker, is on the brink of premiering his difficult second film No Self at the London Film Festival when Billie, his hard drinking publicist, introduces him to a mesmeric French musician called Noah.

The Boys in the Band
At a birthday party in 1968 New York, a surprise guest and a drunken game leave seven gay friends reckoning with unspoken feelings and buried truths.

Pretty Boy
Sean is taken to a motel and is given a prostitute for his 18th birthday by his father. He must sleep with her to "fix" his questionable homosexuality. "Pretty Boy" is a coming of age story of a young bullied teen, Sean, struggling with his sexuality and the hardships of high school. After his father finds some questionable magazines in his room, this devout Christian will go to any lengths to get his son to find the light and "perform" the way a man should. Sean is introduced to Katie, a prostitute that understands the stigmas of modern society and helps him see the true light that is within him.

Do Revenge
A dethroned queen bee at a posh private high school strikes a secret deal with an unassuming new student to enact revenge on one another’s enemies.

Love, Simon
Everyone deserves a great love story, but for 17-year-old Simon Spier, it's a little more complicated. He hasn't told his family or friends that he's gay, and he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous classmate that he's fallen for online.
More Movies Like Smear

The Object of My Affection
A pregnant New York social worker begins to develop romantic feelings for her gay best friend, and decides she'd rather raise her child with him, much to the dismay of her overbearing boyfriend.

The Thing About Harry
Two high school enemies, uber-jock Harry and out-and-proud Sam, are forced to share a car ride to their Missouri hometown for a friend's engagement party on Valentine's Day. Things take a turn when Sam learns Harry has come out.

Fireworks
A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a 'light' and is drawn through the needle's eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to bed less empty than before.

Beautiful Thing
During a long, hot summer on the Thamesmead Estate in Southeast London, three teenagers edge towards adulthood.

Totally F***ed Up
Gay, alienated Los Angeles teens have a hard time as their parents kick them out of their homes, they don’t have money, their lovers cheat, and they are harassed by gay-bashers.

In & Out
A midwestern teacher questions his sexuality after a former student makes a comment about him at the Academy Awards.

Giant Little Ones
Two popular teen boys, best friends since childhood, discover their lives, families, and girlfriends dramatically upended after an unexpected incident occurs on the night of a 17th birthday party.

My Policeman
In the late 1990s, the arrival of elderly invalid Patrick into Marion and Tom’s home triggers the exploration of seismic events from 40 years previous: the passionate relationship between Tom and Patrick at a time when homosexuality was illegal.

Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds
How far would you go to get the person of your dreams? With the help of Gwen and Tiffani, Kyle pretends to be heterosexual in order to land Troy, the new guy (and nude model) who's turning the heads of both men and women. He soon finds himself joining the campus ex-gay support group and nabbing a girlfriend! Kyle's ex-boyfriend Marc is horrified at the plan and decides to pursue the confused Troy with his own tactic -- being his "out" gay self. Who will win Troy first?

The Last Repair Shop
In a warehouse in the heart of Los Angeles, a dwindling handful of devoted craftspeople maintain more than 80,000 student musical instruments, the largest remaining workshop in America of its kind. Meet four unforgettable characters whose broken-and-repaired lives have been dedicated to bringing so much more than music to the schoolchildren of this city.

My Fake Boyfriend
A young man in a tricky situation follows the advice of his unconventional best friend and uses social media to create a fake boyfriend to keep his awful ex-lover out of his life. But everything backfires when he meets the real love of his life, and breaking up with his fake boyfriend proves hard to do.

The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy
A close-knit group of gay friends share the emotional roller coster of life, relationships, the death of friends, new beginnings, jealousy, fatherhood and professional success. At various stages of life's disarray, these young men share humorous and tragic relationships and always have each other to rely on.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Smear (1998): film themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of Smear.
See full details for Smear (1998)
