Directed by Jack Hazan | 106 mins | 1973
Jack Hazan’s intimate and innovative film about English-born, often California-based artist David Hockney and his work honors its subject through creative risk-taking. The improvisatory narrative-nonfiction hybrid features Hockney—a wary participant—as wel...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Terence Davies | 125 mins | 2016
Emily Dickinson’s particular combination of intense brilliance and private, suppressed desires make her an ideal subject for the cinema of Terence Davies. Here, the atmosphere in the Dickinson family home is at first leavened by piq...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 127 mins | 2020
The parallel narratives of a middle-aged man seeking treatment for a chronic illness in Hong Kong (Lee Kang-sheng) and a Laotian immigrant in Bangkok (Anong Houngheuangsy) eventually, finally, meet in a moment of ecstatic release.

Leaving December 1

Directed by Toshio Matsumoto | 105 mins | 1969
Part of the storied output of Japan’s radical Art Theatre Guild, Matsumoto’s dazzling voyage through Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood centers on two gender-nonconforming divas at “Bar Genet” but also doubles as a record of Japan’s av...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Bruce LaBruce | 83 mins | 2013
Working at a nursing home allows 18-year-old Lake (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie) to indulge his burgeoning fetish for much older men. On discovering that the residents are being over-medicated, he takes off with his crush. When it comes to Can...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Hong Khaou | 86 mins | 2014
Subtle but charged performances from both Ben Whishaw and Hong Kong icon Cheng Pei-Pei ("Come Drink with Me") anchor Hong Khaou’s haunting directorial debut, in which the death of a young, gay, Cambodian-Chinese man brings together his g...

Directed by John Maybury | 91 mins | 1998
Long before Daniel Craig pursued a fraught gay romance in "Queer" (2024), there was "Love is the Devil": in this brutal but scintillating flashback to 1960s London, Craig portrays George Dyer, the petty criminal from the rough-and-tumble East End who beca...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Antonio Santini | 90 mins | 2014
With nods to "Paris Is Burning" and the films of Pedro Almodóvar, directors Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles craft a bold and richly affecting document of what it means to be transgender in twenty-first century Puerto Rico. Through t...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Želimir Žilnik | 84 mins | 1995
Žilnik, one of the great, insubordinate talents to emerge from the Yugoslavian “Black Wave” of the 1960s and ’70s, who’d seen his work politically suppressed, took advantage of new permissiveness to produce this raunchy, raucous, and...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew | 28 mins | 2019
A twenty-something gay man develops a relationship over text messages with a stranger he meets on a dating app. Their exchange becomes increasingly intimate as the protagonist navigates life as an architect in New Yor...

Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 87 mins | 2000
The rare film to be both feted by festival cognoscenti and uploaded to disreputable porn sites, Rodrigues’s confrontational, controversial debut feature heralded the arrival of a major queer artist. Concerning the carnal odyssey of a Lisbon trash ...

Directed by Todd Haynes | 85 mins | 1991
With his first feature, Haynes took his influence from the patron saint of all queer outlaw art, the French writer and director Jean Genet. The result, a landmark of New Queer Cinema, was a trio of intercut, stylistically distinct stories drawn together by...

Directed by Steve McLean | 87 mins | 1994
Based on the autobiographical writings of David Wojnarowicz and coming hot on the heels of the firebrand artist-activist’s death from AIDS in 1992, Steve McLean’s feature debut remains an underseen landmark of New Queer Cinema. Interwoven are fictionalize...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Alain Guiraudie | 100 mins | 2013
Lauded and laureled at Cannes, Guiradie’s understated, simmeringly sensual thriller explores the proximity of Eros and Thanatos in an idyllic, lakeside nude beach/cruising spot—shot for maximum pastoral splendor by DP Claire Mathon...

Directed by Tom Kalin | 94 mins | 1992
Tom Kalin’s coruscating debut returns to the scene of the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case, likewise a key inspiration for Hitchcock’s Rope, but in this telling the unspoken homosexual undercurrent of the crime is put boldly front and center. A heavily ...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Maryam Touzani | 122 mins | 2022
An ostensibly happy couple becomes unmoored when they hire a young apprentice for their caftan store in this layered, elegantly sensuous drama by Maryam Touzani, awarded the Cannes Un Certain Regard FIPRESCI Prize. Having long confi...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Maria Maggenti | 95 mins | 1995
Coming of age meets coming out in this charming lesbian romcom, which pairs Laurel Holloman (later, "The L Word"’s Tina) with Nicole Ari Parker ("Boogie Nights") as two high schoolers who forge an unlikely bond: the former a tomboy o...

Directed by Gregg Araki | 85 mins | 1992
A raw, raucous, and at times brutally violent road movie, in which the reckless drifter Luke (mixed martial artist Mike Dytri) links up with cynical film critic Jon (Craig Gilmore), and the duo—both HIV positive, and both in kamikaze mode—hit the road to b...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Frank Simon | 68 mins | 1968
Welcome to the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant, held at New York’s Town Hall! Simon’s essential document of queer history takes us backstage to rehearsals and dressing rooms at a drag competition organized by Flawless Sabrina...

Directed by Gregg Araki | 79 mins | 1993
The first film of Araki’s “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy, which the director once described as a “cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick,” "Totally F***ed Up" focuses on six gay adolescents who, rejected by their families...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Ulrike Ottinger | 131 mins | 1977
The hard, merciless pirate ruler of the China Sea, Madame X sends out a missive to women, inviting them to leave domestic security behind for a life of dangerous adventure, but when a panoply of different women—including Yvonne Ra...

Directed by Ulrike Ottiger | 108 mins | 1979
Ottinger’s collision of Hollywood flamboyancy and a particularly dour documentary aesthetic suits this Janus-faced tale of two female lushes from two very different walks of life, alike in many ways, but incapable of recognizing their bond. One is a kn...

Directed by Ulrike Ottinger | 150 mins | 1984
In Ottinger’s contemporary reinvention of the famous morality tale, fin-de-siècle dandy Dorian Gray is reimagined as a drag role, played without comment on the switch by Veruschka von Lehndorff in the male lead. Ottinger collides Oscar Wilde with Frit...

Directed by Ulrike Ottinger | 127 mins | 1981
An outrageous, carnivalesque camp reading of Virginia Woolf’s "Orlando", Ottinger’s crazed comedy follows its gender nonconforming hero/heroine through five wide-ranging adventures that span the history of the world: the Freak City department store, m...