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A Bigger Splash
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... -
A Quiet Passion
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... -
Funeral Parade of Roses
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... -
Gerontophilia
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... -
Lilting
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... -
Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon
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... -
Mala Mala
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... -
Marble Ass
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 ... -
Negative Two
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... -
O Fantasma
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 ... -
Poison
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... -
Postcards from America
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... -
Stranger by the Lake
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... -
Swoon
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 ... -
The Blue Caftan
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... -
The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love
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... -
The Leather Boys
Leaving November 1
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... -
The Living End
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... -
The Ornithologist
Leaving November 1
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 h... -
The Queen
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... -
Totally F***ed Up
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... -
Will-o'-the-Wisp
Leaving November 1
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 (... -
Winter Kept Us Warm
Leaving November 1
Directed by David Secter | 82 mins | 1965
A landmark in the Canadian film industry as the first English-language film from the country to screen at the Cannes Film Festival and a pioneering work of LGBTQ+ cinema, Secter’s keenly observed, shoestring budget drama stars John Lab...