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 piquant but convivial r...

Leaving May 1

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.

Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 67 mins | 2022
A queer musical fantasia unlike anything in recent cinema, Rodrigues’s 2069 love song finds an ailing monarch flashing back to his erotic youth as a fireman during a time of climate crisis, in which his beefcake blaze-battler (Mauro Costa) is tran...

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...

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—where regular Franc...

Leaving February 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 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 avant-garde and subcul...

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 York City. We catch gli...

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...

Directed by Jennifer Reeder | 80 mins | 2017
In writing this zesty but tender rom-com, Fawzia Mirza—also the film’s star—mined her life experience as a Muslim Pakistani lesbian living in Chicago. Zaynab (Mirza) finds herself falling for the effusive Alma (Sari Sanchez), but isn’t ready to come ou...

Directed by Andrew Ahn | 97 mins | 2016
Andrew Ahn’s remarkably assured debut feature is a portrait of forbidden sexual awakening set in the nocturnal world of spas and karaoke bars in Los Angeles' Koreatown. David Cho (Joe Seo, who won the Special Jury Award at Sundance for his breakthrough perf...

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 João Pedro Rodrigues | 113 mins | 2016
Loosely drawing upon his own life—his father had gifted him a pair of bird-watching binoculars as a child—Rodrigues conjures an ecstatic phantasmagoria about an avian peeper (erstwhile haute couture hunk Paul Hamy) who finds himself in a lusty re...

Directed by Sidney J. Furie | 107 mins | 1964
Long before he directed the Diana Ross vehicle "Lady Sings the Blues" and cult horror classic "The Entity," versatile Canadian filmmaker Furie helmed this Cockney tale of motorized delinquency and Ton-Up rocker subculture, starring Colin Campbell and ...

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 the personal journeys...

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 confined his homosexualit...

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 on the social margins...

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 grieving mother and t...

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 Canadian provocateur Br...

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 disarmingly tender ...

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...

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...