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Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues pulls exactly zero punches in his feature debut, in which a Lisbon-based trash collector (Ricardo Menses) gently rebuffs the attention of a female co-worker while lusting after a mysterious motorcyclist. When he’s not on the job, however, he’s on the prowl — and his preference for rough trade, autoerotic asphyxiation, […]

One of the first American films to directly address the specter of AIDS, writer-director Bill Sherwood’s indie drama initially focuses on Robert (John Bolger), whose New York job has just transferred him to Africa for a few years, and his boyfriend, Michael (Richard Ganoung), who isn’t coming with him. As the couple negotiate a farewell […]

An experimental doc from the legendary filmmaker Barbara Hammer, this collage of personal testimonies, gay and lesbian ephemera, and a profilette of author Willa Cather is a roundabout mediation on, per its creator, “a repressed and marginalized history” of queer life in the 20th century. And in a little over an hour, she accomplishes all […]

If Marlon Riggs’ cine-essay on growing up as a gay African American man — and how he learned to celebrate that fact — was simply an incredible work of autobiography, it would still belong on this list. It is, naturally, a lot more than just one person’s story. Riggs keeps things personal but purposefully widens […]

Ron Peck’s tale of a teacher (Ken Robertson) who haunts London’s gay clubs at night has earned a cult following for its rare depiction of homosexuality in the U.K. as something that existed within a subculture, and not simply as a crime. There’s an almost documentary-like quality to our hero’s after-hour journeys, with a gritty, […]

Tom Joslin knew he was dying of AIDS. So was his partner of two decades, Mark Massi. So Joslin enlisted a friend and former student of his named Peter Friedman to help them capture their final months. It starts as a portrait of a couple, enjoying their time together and testifying to the endurance of […]

John Waters’ best-known movie pits Babs Johnson — played, of course, by his plus-size muse, Divine — against a depraved couple (David Lochary and Mink Stole) for the title of “the filthiest person in the world.” No spoilers, but let’s just say the duo do not stand a chance in hell from wrestling that honor […]

San Francisco activist Harvey Milk became a groundbreaker when he joined the city’s board of supervisors and became the first out homosexual politician in California’s history. He would later become a martyr when he was gunned down in his office at City Hall. Long before Gus Van Sant’s biopic would share Milk’s story with the […]

The signature shot of Wong Kar-Wai’s woozy, intoxicating love story — Leslie Cheung’s head resting on his boyfriend Tony Leung’s shoulder, as the latter looks at his lover with a combination of worry and wariness — immediately gives you a sense of this couple’s dynamic. They can’t live with each other, they can’t live without […]

Writer-director Gregg Araki (The Living End) was already known for working with low budgets to make provocative, powerful LGBTQ films about young adulthood, sexuality, and alienation. With Mysterious Skin, though, he ventured into slightly more mainstream terrain — only slightly, however — with this tale of two men forever impacted by their intense relationship with […]

How much passion can be conveyed in a single glance? It’s a question French writer-director Céline Sciamma’s sublime fourth feature asks again and again, chronicling a burning though discreet love affair between a young painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), and her subject, the soon-to-be-married Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). The latter does not wish to be rendered on […]

Addiction and commitment are the intertwining themes of director Ira Sachs’ semiautobiographical portrait of a couple whose intense bond keeps threatening to shatter. Zachary Booth plays Paul, an attorney with a drug problem who falls for Erik (Thure Lindhardt), an artist and filmmaker. Told in bits and pieces over 10 years — and charting how […]

The movies of Derek Jarman, a major British filmmaker, ran the gamut from punk provocations (Jubilee, Sebastiane) to period-piece biopics (Caravaggio, Wittgenstein) to the avant-garde (Blue, which replicated the director’s gradual loss of eyesight as he was dying from an AIDS-related ailment). If we had to pick one film to serve as an introduction to this […]

Russell (Tom Cullen) sees Glen (Chris New) from across a crowded London bar. He takes the handsome guy back to his place and, per one-night-stand etiquette, fixes him coffee the next morning before bidding him adieu. Except these guys aren’t quite done with each other yet, and they end up hanging out some more that […]

German writer-director Frank Ripploh semiautobiographical movie remains a landmark because it refused to present the “positive gay image” so many advocated for to achieve acceptance by straight people — instead, it celebrates the art of being a sexual outlaw. His fictional counterpart, a cheerful 30-year-old grade-school teacher in West Berlin named Frank, wobbles between his […]

Writer/director Dee Rees’ film opens at a Brooklyn nightclub where A.G.s (“Aggressive Lesbians”), “soft studs,” and queer black women of all shapes and sizes are having a good time. Immediately, we are given intimate access to a subculture marginalized within the black community — but rather than make the audience feel like interlopers, we’re invited […]

When does your choice in ice cream become subversive? Diego (Jorge Perugorría) is a cultured, Cuban gay man who treats a devouring spoonful of strawberry ice cream like a sexual experience; David (Vladimir Cruz) is rigid, chocolate-preferring Communist. The former invites the young, straight political-science student to his apartment, tucked inside a grand decaying building […]

Directed by Rose Troche (and co-written by Troche and star Guinevere Turner), this low-budget, black-and-white film became a Sundance breakout and a minor indie hit; in the days before The L Word, their portrait of the lives and loves of modern lesbians felt downright revolutionary. “I was a dyke when you were still in diapers, […]

Meet Flawless Sabrina, or simply “the Queen,” who’s primping and planning for the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest that will take place at New York City’s Town Hall. As for the other drag queens who will be her competition, you can watch them rehearsing their numbers in bathing suits, or eavesdrop on other seminude […]

William Friedkin’s take on Mart Crowley’s popular 1968 off-Broadway play already felt a little dated when it came out a year after the Stonewall riots (the casual racism and focus on self-loathing didn’t help). Yet the film remains one of the first frank big-studio treatments of uncloseted gay and bisexual men, as it follows eight […]

For those who aren’t familiar with Larry Kramer’s landmark 1985 AIDS play, Ryan Murphy’s HBO movie (with a screenplay adapted by Kramer) may seem like little more than a star-studded true-to-life drama. It was designed as an urgent political statement, delivered just as AIDS had begun decimating the gay community — those strident speeches and […]

There’s Gregory (Stephen Bogardus), a successful Broadway choreographer, and his young blind boyfriend, Bobby (Justin Kirk). There’s Perry (Stephen Spinella) and Arthur (John Benjamin Hickey), a couple who are celebrating their 14th anniversary. There’s the HIV-positive Buzz Hauser (Jason Alexander), described as “the love child of Judy Garland and Liberace” (if you’ve ever wanted to […]

The key movie of what would become known as the “New Queer Cinema” (see also Tom Kalin’s Swoon and Gregg Araki’s The Living End), Todd Haynes’ triptych gives us the story of a child who murders an abuser and mysteriously disappears (“Hero”), a Fifties-style monster movie about a scientist who turns into a hideous creature […]

Pedro Almodóvar’s filmography is filled with gay characters, gay love, gay sex, and gay sensibilities — you can see it in his punkish late-Seventies shorts, his campy farces (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), his Hitchcockian thrillers (Matador, Law of Desire), and his melodramas (Bad Education, All About My Mother). The Spanish filmmaker’s […]

A page-to-screen take on Vito Russo’s seminal book regarding LGBTQ representation (and misrepresentation) in the movies, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary presents the perfect show-and-tell complement to the late scholar’s work — you can literally see the evolution of cinematic homosexuality as it progresses from punchline to social punditry, sidekick-and-stock-villain fodder to queers becoming […]

The powder keg of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain is the setting for this unlikely U.K. gay love story, which tackles issues ranging from homophobia to colonialism. A Pakistani-British twentysomething (Gordon Warnecke) tries to jump-start a failing South London laundromat with the help of his ex-skinhead boyfriend (Daniel Day-Lewis). The subversive indie film would prove to be […]

Most modern movie musicals have a canned quality — a slick, artificial sheen that sucks all the air out of the stage shows they adapt. And then there is John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of his cult off-Broadway musical, which traces the ups and downs in the life of a genderqueer East Berliner who, following a […]

You could include any number of prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s movies on this list, from the fear-and-self-loathing portraiture of Fox and His Friends to his Sirkian transgender melodrama In the Year of 13 Moons. But it’s his last film, a loose adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1947 novel, that’s arguably his most unabashedly queer […]

Set on the muddy, windswept moors of Yorkshire, Francis Lee’s debut feature follows Johnny (Josh O’Connor), a young gay man leading a dead-end existence on his family farm, and Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a Romanian migrant worker who comes to help out during lamb-birthing season. As the two men’s mutual lust grows into something deeper, the […]

For decades, cinematic lesbian stories tended to end in tragedy — a not-so-subtle reminder of where Hollywood stood when it came to depictions of same-sex relationships. But then along came Donna Deitch’s story of an English professor (Helen Shaver) who goes to Reno to qualify for a quickie divorce and ends up falling for the […]

A heartbreakingly gentle portrait of a young man’s very rough life growing up gay in Miami’s impoverished Liberty City neighborhood, Barry Jenkins’ lyrical second film, presented in three acts, juxtaposes moments of incredible tenderness between men with bursts of casual cruelty. Throughout his school years, Chiron is bullied mercilessly, finding comfort only in the occasional […]

Director Todd Haynes’ adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel centers around two women — unhappily married socialite Carol (Cate Blanchett) and the department-store salesgirl she pursues an affair with, Therese (Rooney Mara) — so hemmed in by 1950s convention you can practically see the boxes that surround them. That also means you can feel the […]

Mainstream movie audiences have never had an easy time with love scenes between two men — until Luca Guadinigno’s sumptuous adaptation of André Aciman’s novel. Set in the verdant hills and tastefully cluttered halls of a villa in Northern Italy in 1983, the film charts the sexual awakening of 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet), who becomes […]

Drenched in heroin chic and featuring Ally Sheedy at her Ally Sheediest, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s feature debut put forth not just a romance between two women — Sheedy’s lapsed, louche photographer Lucy and earnest aspiring editor Syd (a baby-faced Rhada Mitchell) — but a bohemian world where sexuality was fluid, drugs were a constant, and […]

The HIV virus hit the gay community around the same time that the personal camcorder hit retail shelves — which is one reason David France’s Oscar-nominated film about the formation of activist organization groups ACT UP and TAG (Treat Action Group) has such a shattering impact. There is so much in-the-moment footage from which to […]

“Gay-hustler indie” may now seem like a Sundance cliché, but until Gus Van Sant’s third feature dropped audiences into the insular world of Portland’s street culture, no one had made a movie that addressed the subject with such a mix of poetry and blunt honesty. River Phoenix is Mike Waters, a narcoleptic young man selling […]

Unlike so many films that focus on wartime action, Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox’s story of a doomed romance showed the quotidian drudgery of the men and women conscripted into the army after high school — and how love can blossom amid the desert desolation. Soldiers Yossi (Ohad Knoller) and Jagger (Yehuda Levi) sneak off on […]

Long before the world at large awakened to what transgender means, director Kimberly Peirce showed us with this wrenching dramatization of the real-life story of Brandon Teena, a trans man who was raped and murdered in small-town Nebraska after locals discovered his biological gender. While conversation around the film has evolved to question the casting […]

Writer-director Robin Campillo and his co-writer Philippe Mangeot based this film on their own experiences in the ACT UP movement in the 1990s — and their commitment to realism shows in this achingly raw drama, set during the depths of the AIDS crisis in Mitterrand-era Paris. It’s an ensemble piece dedicated to portraying a chorus […]

Before the Wachowskis had the financial pull to film big-budget dreamscapes like The Matrix trilogy, there was their 1996 directorial debut — shot on only a $6 million budget after the filmmakers refused to bow to studio pressure and erase the lesbian romance at the film’s center. The result is a witty, bloody neo-noir following […]

Jennie Livingston’s doc about the 1980s New York ball scene is a portrait of a moment in LGBTQ history that flamed impossibly bright — and burned out all too fast. Over the seven years of the film’s creation, Livingston captured the creativity, vibrancy, and drama of Harlem’s drag balls, as well as bringing a whole […]

Bathed in the buttery light of West Hollywood in wintertime (and shot entirely on iPhones), Sean Baker’s microbudget film tracks a day in the lives of transgender sex workers Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, both trans actresses of color) as they search for the former’s two-timing boyfriend. In between tramping up […]

To say that William Friedkin’s thriller about a serial killer targeting gay men in New York was controversial would be putting it mildly: Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell (whose coverage of murders in the West Village bar scene was a partial inspiration) called the script “the worst possible nightmare of the most uptight straight”; establishments […]

Marina is a Santiago, Chile-based waitress by day and club singer by night; she and her significant other, Orlando, are planning a nice, long vacation. Then her lover dies, and suddenly, Marina finds herself having to battle Orlando’s family — and Chile’s less-than-friendly attitude toward trans women — for the chance to grieve and properly […]

British filmmaker Isaac Julien’s freeform tribute-cum-“meditation” on Langston Hughes seeks to reframe the Harlem Renaissance poet from the perspective of being not just a black artist, but a black queer artist. Blending readings of his work with sequences of gorgeous men in tuxedos dancing and cruising each other (or posing naked), the movie specifically places […]

Two cowboys — the stoic Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and the slightly more social Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) — are hired to tend to a rancher’s flock of sheep in Wyoming circa 1963. The men end up finding intimacy on the plains and, despite both of them marrying, carry on a clandestine relationship for […]

A modern-American epic set amid the mounting AIDS crisis of the Reagan era, Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play was translated to the screen in a multipart, six-hour event for HBO by director Mike Nichols. The performances are staggering: Al Pacino as the ignominious Roy Cohn; Jeffrey Wright is the sharp-witted gay nurse who tends to […]

This German drama about a new student (Hertha Thiele) who is smitten with everyone’s favorite professor (Dorothea Wieck) at an all-girls boarding school didn’t just put a love that dare not speak its name front and center — it presented such a relationship with empathy, kindness, and genuine respect, even as the powers that be […]

Cheryl Dunye’s feature debut follows a video-store employee/aspiring filmmaker (played by the writer-director herself) trying to chase down the story of Fae Richards, a forgotten African American performer from the 1930s known only as “the Watermelon Woman.” It is, in many ways, a serious attempt at reclaiming the legacy of an entire generation of marginalized […]

Documentarians Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, and Rob Epstein’s oral history of gay life gives close to two dozen men and women a chance to tell their stories — and lets the participants share their personal perspectives on everything from coming of age to coming out, from love to heartbreak, from co-parenting with their partners to […]