The 100 Best LGBTQ Movies of All Time
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The 100 Best LGBTQ Films of All Time

Cinema isn’t the sole mechanism for making our presence known, but it can be among the most powerful.

Seven years ago this month, in the aftermath of the attack on Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, one call to action rose above the din: “Say their names.” New Yorkers chanted it steps from the Stonewall Inn. The mother of a child gunned down at Sandy Hook penned it in an open letter. The Orlando Sentinel printed the names. Anderson Cooper recited them. A gunman, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in the wee hours of that awful Sunday, massacring LGBTQ people of color and their allies in the middle of Pride Month, and the commemoration of the dead demanded knowing who they were. “These,” as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell urged his viewers, “are the names to remember.”

The titles on our list of the best LGBTQ movies of all time are a globe-spanning, multigenerational testament to our existence in a world where our erasure is no abstraction. From Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Michael to Todd Haynes’s Carol, naming and seeing emerge, intertwined, as radical acts—acts of becoming (Sally Potter’s Orlando) and acts of being (Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason), acts of speech (Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied) and acts of show (Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning) that together reaffirm the revolutionary potential of the seventh art. “My name is Harvey Milk,” the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, memorialized in Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk, proclaimed in 1978, less than one year before his assassination. “And I’m here to recruit you!”

The cinema isn’t the sole mechanism for making our presence known, but it can, if the films listed below are any indication, be among the most powerful, projecting the complexities of the LGBTQ experience onto the culture’s largest, brightest mirror. There’s rage here, and also love; isolation, and communal spirit; fear, and the forthright resistance to it. These films are essential because we are essential: The work of ensuring that we aren’t erased or forgotten continues apace, and the struggle stretches into a horizon that no screen, no matter its size, can quite capture. But this is surely a place to start. Matt Brennan

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this list can be found on our Patreon.

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Michael

Michael (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924)

Many have chosen to downplay Michael’s gay subtext, but to do so would deny the power of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s fastidious attention to the polarity of love’s vicissitudes. If stripped of the notion that the artist Zoret’s (Benjamin Christensen) attraction toward his titular muse (Walter Slezak), whose alleged bisexuality is clearly of a solely opportunistic strain, is physical as well as social, the film essentially becomes an embittered (and fairly rote, despite the astonishingly suffocating mise-en-scène) tale of two cuckolds. Eric Henderson


Madchen in Uniform

Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931)

Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform sees youthful desire as fluid, disorienting, and rebellious. Sagan sensitively regards the female camaraderie within the confines of a strict German all-girls school, as well as the burgeoning lustfulness of the teenage Manuela (Hertha Thiele). The girl’s affection for her sympathetic teacher, Fraulein von Bernberg (Dorothea Wieck), is expressed and reciprocated through furtive glances and sensual gestures that hint at an underlying and forbidden passion that can never be fully manifested. This tender portrait of unrequited love both excoriates the regressive ideals of a school’s and, by proxy, a nation’s power structures, advocating for compassion, tolerance, and the normalization of all desire. Derek Smith


The Blood of a Poet

The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1932)

From clutching his bare chest after witnessing his palm sprout a pair of lips to peering through keyholes while drifting through a gravity-free hallway. Enrique Rivero’s shirtless torso remains the most enduring emblem of Jean Cocteau’s avant-garde classic The Blood of a Poet. But this surrealist masterpiece isn’t merely about flesh; rather, the body becomes an entry point to memory and art, with hands and mouths giving way to images that defy the mind. Decades of close readings, whether along psychological or self-reflexive lines, have been unable to diminish or demystify the film’s effervescent sensuality. Clayton Dillard


Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)

Much of Beauty and the Beast’s magic comes from Jean Cocteau’s sense of himself as a vulnerable beast in love. Cocteau was openly gay in an often viciously homophobic post-Vichy France, an opium addict, and plagued by skin-disfiguring eczema. He was also enamored of his much younger star, Jean Marais, his sometime-lover and great friend and collaborator. In Marais’s triple role—as the monstrous yet tender-hearted Beast; Avenant, the hunky but caddish suitor of Josette Day’s La Belle; and the ensorcelled Prince Ardent, whom the Beast is ultimately revealed, with some ambivalence, to be—the actor lends virtuosic and symbolic appeal to a cinematic inquiry into the complex interplay of identification and desire. Max Cavitch

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Fireworks

Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947)

Fireworks inaugurated not only the private mythology of underground experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, but also the subversive expression of gay sensuality in American film, a torch carried into the early days of the New Queer Cinema. A veritable dictionary of homoerotic iconography, the 1947 short is also, literally, a home movie shot while a 20-year-old Anger’s parents were away for the weekend, and a transfixing view of the violence and seditious rapture of being “different” in the 1940s. Fernando F. Croce


Un Chant d’Amour

Un Chant d’Amour (Jean Genet, 1950)

Jean Genet’s overpowering 1950 short Un Chant d’Amour, made shortly after the publication of The Thief’s Journal, is a milestone not just of gay rebellion, but also of pure sensual expression in film, a polemical vision of desire forged with the provocateur’s randy ardor and the artist’s spiritual directness. Having never made a film before or after, Genet nevertheless had an in-the-bone awareness of the medium as a procession of raptures—visual, cosmic, sensual—that could match and expand the passion of words on a page. Croce


Strangers on a Train

Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)

Alfred Hitchcock knew what he was doing casting plush-lipped Farley Granger as the straight man in his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. Robert Walker’s flamboyant Bruno Anthony gets all the ink, but it’s Granger’s blank-slate attractiveness as Guy that captures the illicit thrill of the chase. And the consequence. Once Bruno has availed Guy of his inconvenient woman and Guy refuses to return the favor, Bruno sets out to integrate himself into Guy’s social circle and carry with him the threat of exposure and public shame. Their erotic one-upmanship reaches its breaking point in one of Hitchcock’s gaudiest set pieces, a runaway-carousel climax depicting their rough trade of blows amid contorted petrified horses whose pinions look like they’re pornographically violating their sockets. Henderson


Rebel Without a Cause

Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)

The most complicated aspect of Rebel Without a Cause, and the thing that makes it seem daring even today, is its depiction of sexuality. Nicholas Ray brings Natalie Wood’s beauty into full flowering and gets a simple, touching performance from her. And with Sal Mineo, he craftily put together a portrait of a tormented gay teenager. Stewart Stern’s script tells us that Plato is searching for a father figure in Jim (and Plato’s famed locker photo of Alan Ladd shows that he wants a Shane-type father, not a lover), but the way Mineo looks at James Dean leaves no modern audience in doubt as to what his real feelings are. Dan Callahan

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Victim

Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961)

Victim follows the closeted Melville Farr’s (Dick Bogarde) investigation into the various catacombs of the London elite, where far-reaching compromise and repression construct a pressure cooker of emotional fear. Since homosexuality is illegal in England at the time, the lawyer’s stake in the vexing search for the person responsible for an elaborate blackmail scheme targeting high-profile gay men is both personal and professional. Mostly, Victim is fascinating for its consistent attention to the complex emotions of its gay characters, men who often show an unwavering honesty in respect to their sexuality. Glenn Heath Jr.


Flaming Creatures

Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963)

Flaming Creatures was Jack Smith’s first finished film. Well, in truth, it’s his only finished film, since it ricocheted out of his hands when a trend of underground film raids made his opus a trophy for either side of a decency debate. Seized at the same time as Genet’s Un Chant D’Amour and Anger’s Scorpio Rising, it made it all the way to the Supreme Court, whose judges could detect little value in its over-exposed rumpus of genitalia, transvestitism, baroque orgies, and dance dervishry. Meanwhile, Susan Sontag and Jonas Mekas heralded the film as high art, hijacking Smith’s vehicle to bolster their tastemaker status. Bradford Nordeen


The Servent

The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)

Though justifiably hailed as a classic of the LGBTQ film canon, The Servant doesn’t exactly present a GLAAD Media Award-ready vision of queerness. Joseph Losey’s hothouse of free-floating perversity situates the specter of gayness as but one head on a hydra-like invader bent on demolishing the pillars of the genteel British elite. If gayness remains figured as a malignant force in here (a half-acknowledged deviance here mobilized in the pursuit of manipulation and personal gain), there’s also something undeniably thrilling about watching it wind its destructive path, vivified by Joseph Losey’s taut pacing, stylish formal play, and distressing-as-ever atmospherics. A film such as this probably couldn’t be made now without cries of protest over its representational politics, which is probably a good thing. Matthew Connolly


Scorpio Rising

Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)

Scorpio Rising merges Kenneth Anger’s fascination with rough trade with his burgeoning interest in the Dark Arts, at least as it applies to the standard “sex, drugs, rock n’ roll” scene. What begins with references to James Dean and the soaring beefcake photography of Bob Mizer ultimately ends in a whirl of skulls, swastikas, the spiritual sacrilege of pissing on the Catholic altar, and the societal blasphemy of rubbing mustard into the crotch of a stripped leather geek. This is the Gospel according to Anger. Henderson

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My Hustler

My Hustler (Andy Warhol, 1965)

The commodification of desire (and the desire in commodification) have rarely been examined with the cool wit of Andy Warhol’s landmark film. Whose hustler is Paul America, the blond stud whom we first see lolling about on a stretch of Fire Island beach? Men and women of various sexual orientations spend the film’s 67-minute running time lusting after, bitching about, probing into, and yearning for this midnight cowboy. Throughout, America remains a lanky libidinal enigma, or maybe just a chiseled blank slate. He embodies a distinctly Warholian vision of queer erotics that’s tantalizingly ambiguous, achingly aloof, and always connected to that essential bulge in your pants: your wallet. Connolly


Portrait of Jason

Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967)

In Portrait of Jason, Jason Holliday’s waning lucidity becomes a clever rhetorical weapon against Shirley Clarke’s occasional attempts to turn him into an icon of the gay black experience. But she wins out overall, and quite devilishly. When he breaks down after being harangued by off-screen voices, his tears feel nearly funereal. Jason exposes his self-destructiveness to Clarke because he intuits that the resulting object will outlive him—and that it will allow him to outlive himself, and his self-destructiveness. He’s correct. But the film is a conversation between two disadvantaged artists with indelible personalities, both of whom are unabashedly manipulating their way into at least the esoteric side of the everlasting. Joseph Jon Lanthier


Funeral Parade of Roses

Funeral Parade of Roses (Matsumoto Toshio, 1969)

Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral Parade of Roses takes the thematic and stylistic template of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour—traumatic memory, documentary interests, elliptical editing—and further layers it with reflexive elements related to the nature of identity as it pertains to a group of queens in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Matsumoto’s Oedipal tale has influenced directors from Stanley Kubrick to Tsai Ming-liang, but the film remains a singular work on the ways gender performance, whether in sexual practice or art, ubiquitously informs human behavior and interaction, right down to a trick who asks Eddie (Pîtâ) if she likes his muscles before lifting a chair to narcissistically show them off. Dillard


The Boys in the Band

The Boys in the Band (William Friedkin, 1970)

William Friedkin’s adaptation of The Boys in the Band is indeed a time capsule of its era’s mores, but if Matt Crowley’s limited palette of self-loathing and camp-drenched cattiness made the play an instant “period piece” per Vito Russo, the notion that it blames these men for their fears and lies (which sat well with moralists viewing it as a cautionary tale) seems a clear misreading. The dishy wit and behavioral truths of its late-’60s demimonde of sophisticated New York homos doesn’t dilute the unnerving shame and emotional warfare that explode in its scabrous second act. The partygoers are caught in the tragedy of the pre-liberation closet, a more crippling and unforgiving one than the closets that remain. Bill Weber

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Trash

Trash (Paul Morrissey, 1970)

With her googly eyes, a nest of burgeoning dreads atop her head, and a pronounced overbite that turns her lips into a pair of string beans, the transgender Holly Woodlawn’s untraditional sort of glamour lends a surprising poignancy to the wrenching scene when she unleashes a volcanic tantrum of violated trust, festering jealousy, and, ultimately, wounded pride at the realization that perhaps it’s her and not heroin that keeps Joe Dallesandro’s cock flaccid in bed. The frazzled, cracked-glass-Cassavetes close-ups that Paul Morrissey bequeathed to her talent caught the eye of none other than George Cukor, who started an ultimately unsuccessful petition campaign in support of an Oscar nomination. Oscars, schmoscars. To call Holly’s performance in Trash one of the very greatest in all of cinema would be an understatement. Henderson


Death in Venice

Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971)

An aging composer, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), takes refuge in a resort to recharge his intellectual energies, only to be unsettled by the beauty of a blond adolescent boy who’s also staying at the resort. Luchino Visconti’s masterful Death in Venice tackles complicated notions of idealization, adult-child affection, and the virtual impossibility of reciprocity with a philosophical depth that never feels immaterial. It also features a grand finale set to Gustav Mahler’s magnificent “Symphony Number 5” where beauty, and the desire it begets, is proven to not stand a chance before man’s propensity for annihilation. Diego Semerene


Pink Narcissus

Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971)

At this point in American underground cinema, gay directors were celebrating those sweet sticky things in contexts cerebral and performative (Flaming Creatures) and matter-of-factly declarative (Wakefield Poole’s bawdy of work). Photographer James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus transcends any niche descriptor that applies—queer, camp, avant-garde, softcore, documentary expressionism—and plunges into the deep end of consciousness-annihilating erotic desire. If Cate Blanchett’s Carol marveled, to her romantic conquest, “I never looked like this” (a pretty hot line in its own right), Pink Narcissus flips the equation to explore the electric sexual charge of finding in others the things that are also available at one’s own fingertips. Henderson


Sunday Bloody Sunday

Sunday Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971)

Though it depicts an eventful week in the lives of two semi-swinging Londoners—Daniel, a gay doctor (Peter Finch), and Alex, a divorced civil servant’s scion (Glenda Jackson)—who begrudgingly share the affections of an aimless bohemian named Bob (Murray Head), John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday is almost naïvely nonpolemical. No one needs to fight for the right to screw who they want, when they want, and with whatever paucity of adjoining obligations. This calmness is never titillating, and thus never exploitative. But we soon learn that the characters are treating themselves and each other with such quiet unfairness that to exploit them visually would be crude and redundant. Lanthier

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The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

The central irony of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is that Petra (Margit Carstensen) is an egomaniac who comes to be undone by objectifications that have previously served her. She’s the kind of person who hides behind a devotion to “truth,” and to implicit gender equality, as an excuse to tear someone to pieces, and that’s what Karin (Hanna Schygulla), the object of her tormented obsession, does to her. Petra fetishizes Karin as a downtrodden doll to be upgraded, and thusly opens herself up to the sort of catastrophic humbling that, in German cinema, at least goes as far back as The Blue Angel. Chuck Bowen


Pink Flamingos

Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972)

Roger Ebert once said that his temptation to praise Pink Flamingos was a temptation he could resist, but I often disarmingly feel much like Divine’s Babs Johnson when I recall John Waters’s “filthiest” film: “Oh my god almighty, someone has sent me a bowel movement!” Yes, the gags in Pink Flamingos go straight to the entrails, but they’re also made exterior by putting both queer bodies and acts on display without reservation, including a sloppy blowjob that Babs gives to her son, Crackers (Danny Mills). Few films aimed at sexual transgression also make the prospect of communal inclusion seem so curiously tangible. Dillard


Female Trouble

Female Trouble (John Waters, 1974)

I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed harder in my life than the first time I saw Dawn Davenport (Divine) bury her mother under a Christmas tree, stomp several presents, and scream “Fuck you! I hate you!” to her parents after not receiving a much-desired pair of cha-cha heels. Such is director John Waters’s crude mastery, bridging queer sexual politics with ecstatic slapstick humor. On that front, Female Trouble is his masterpiece, a three-ring circus of scatological absurdities, epitomized Taffy’s (Mink Stole) line to Dawn: “I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!” Dillard


Fox and His Friends

Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

For all of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s gripes with an elite gay culture’s many sexual hang-ups, Fox and His Friends is first and foremost a riveting evocation of social Darwinism in action. Not for nothing is Fassbinder’s Fox called “stupid and primitive” at one point. The film’s pessimism is far outweighed by Fassbinder’s humane indictment of Fox as an active participant in his own victimization, a familiar critique found in many of the director’s films. Fassbinder likens the abuse that his main character (played by himself) suffers at the hands of his “friends” to that of a poor animal ravaged by carnivorous predators, and the smell of human hate is certainly far more crippling than the smell of urine that hangs from his clothes. Ed Gonzalez

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Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)

It’s been said, to the point of triteness, that cinema is the stuff that dreams are made of. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom couldn’t be more cinematic, then, as it tells the ID-centric Sadean tale of unleashed perversion without pathologizing or punishing the unconscious for what it simply wants: the most beautiful buttocks in the world, barking teenagers on a leash, and feces as dinner entrée in this case. Pasolini expands the limits of cinema through the logic of unbridled hedonism of the film’s main characters. All sexuality is perverse, all relations of power are unbalanced, and disgust is never much more than a defense mechanism against some kind of primary attraction. Semerene


Je, Tu, Il, Elle

Je, Tu, Il, Elle (Chantal Akerman, 1976)

In the gap between her character’s behaviors as spoken and as performed, Chantal Akerman locates an incipient madness, a fracturing of identity that mirrors the dissociations of the film’s title. Whereas the filmmaker keeps Julie’s sexual relationship with a long-distance driver off screen, by Je, Tu, Il, Elle’s end she gives us the lesbian union between Julie and her initially reluctant ex-girlfriend in all its graphic tangling, as the two women tumble around on the bed, taking turns on top, and providing an antidote to the identity-effacing displacements of heterosexual interaction, however fleeting it may finally prove to be. Andrew Schener


A Place Without Limits

A Place Without Limits (Arturo Ripstein, 1978)

The treacheries of traditionalist masculinity pollute the small Mexican town at the heart of Arturo Ripstein’s 1978 stunner, which places several female characters in the crosshairs of a corrupt and violent patriarchy. The victims include La Manuela (Roberto Cobo), the cross-dressing owner of a dwindling brothel, whose sexually charged interaction with Pancho (Gonzalo Vega), a macho truck driver, leads to violence and tragedy. Ripstein’s endemic commentary on homophobia and male fear of emasculation takes an understated but pointed form throughout. Pancho’s line to La Manuela’s daughter is indicative of the film’s would-be hyperbolic dialogue: “I’ll kill you if you tell someone you saw me crying.” Dillard


In a Year of 13 Moons

In a Year of 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

“He says he’s not a man, but a woman,” says the man who beats Volker Spengler’s Elvira Weishaupt at a Frankfurt cruising spot for gays when he discovers she doesn’t have a penis between her legs. If the man and his posse of Wakefield Poole queens are largely archetypical, Elvira represents something more prototypical: a transgender woman who suffers so that all others who find themselves caught “in between” can flourish. In a Year of 13 Moons may be Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s greatest triumph, because its kitchen-sink melodrama collectively addresses the domestic, cultural, psychological, spiritual, and existential hang-ups of the human condition his others films addressed individually. Gonzalez

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Les Rendez-vous d’Anna

Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)

In Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna, most of Anna’s (Aurore Clément) on-the-road pickups are men, but it’s the lesbian encounter that she describes to her mother that fulfills her. Rich with images and symbols of displacement, the film moves beyond the locked-down claustrophobia of Jeanne Dielman to evoke the languors and frustrations of an opposite but equally deadening mode of existence. As Akerman follows the eponymous woman on her travels through Cologne, Brussels, and Paris, she lingers on a repeated series of images and events—the halogen glow of platforms glimpsed from train windows, the uniform rows of hotel corridors, Anna’s perpetually unsuccessful attempts to call a friend (lover?) in Italy—to evoke the banality of a perpetual rootlessness which Akerman posits as something like an existential state. Schenker


Nighthawks

Nighthawks (Ron Peck, 1978)

Ron Peck’s debut feature offers a bracingly insightful look at the intricacies of, well, looking. Geography teacher Jim (Ken Robertson) cruises the London gay scene most nights, finding a fair amount of erotic success while weighing the costs and benefits of potential coupledom. Lingering long takes richly capture post-coital chats, drunken confessionals, and fraught public outings (in every sense of the term). And if images of pulsing gay club dance floors recall a past time and place, anyone whose eyes have ever scanned a room—or a screen—of bodies and faces just might feel that familiar twinge of thrilling, anxious, endless possibility. Connolly


Querelle

Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

Adapted from Jean Genet’s 1947 novel Querelle of Brest, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film saw him addressing familiar themes of betrayal and power relations. Only this time the setting is a wildly theatricalized port called Brest, a mythical dominion where the borders of identity are patrolled and blurred. And at the center of it all is an impossibly hunky thief and murderer, Querelle (Brad Davis), to which everyone is drawn, and who’s an embodiment of every agony that possessed Genet and chased him across his life. The whole thing plays out in a kind of liminal space, where pain becomes inseparable from pleasure. Fassbinder’s style is one of multitudes, at once dreamlike and nightmarish, rigorous yet fluid, suggesting a memory being willed into beautiful being before its maker takes his last breath. Gonzalez


The Times of Harvey Milk

The Times of Harvey Milk (Rob Epstein, 1984)

Rob Epstein’s grandest coup, and what elevates The Times of Harvey Milk beyond being a stunning, emotional docudrama and into the realm of elegant social activism, is in the subtle parallels he draws between the Harvey Milk/Dan White dichotomy and the concurrent, controversial battle over Proposition 6, which would grant California public schools permission to fire openly gay teachers. The coalescing Moral Majority brigade (which would form the first significant American movement in backlash against the gay community’s gains since Stonewall) were putting all their chips on a wager that the American public’s tolerance would only go so far, and the line in the sand: “the children.” It was a bet that was paying off in elections across the country in the late ‘70s—to a musical accompaniment from Anita Bryant. Henderson

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The Angelic Conversation

The Angelic Conversation (Derek Jarman, 1985)

By the time he made The Angelic Conversation, Derek Jarman had witnessed the same England he envisioned as an anarchic punk playpen a few years earlier in Jubilee become a conservative reformatory under Margaret Thatcher’s grip. Societal strictures scarcely blunted the avant-garde British filmmaker’s anger, yet The Angelic Conversation is one of his most serene and lyrical works. It’s certainly his most romantic: While Shakespearean sonnets are read in Judi Dench’s dulcet tones, two boys (Paul Reynolds and Phillip Williamson) wander through densely layered tableaux of desolate, rocky landscapes in a sort of abstruse search for the “eternal touch.” The film has the sense of subversive passion of a Jean Genet poem while anticipating the ineffable melancholy of Aleksandr Sokurov’s mood pieces. Croce


Before Stonewall

Before Stonewall (Greta Schiller, 1985)

Before Stonewall is carried by a cadre of intelligent, colorful interview subjects, whose reminisces vary widely between violent and restrained to sanguine. Motorcycle-riding Native American advocate Dorothy “Smilie” Hillaire tells a compelling tale of how she was harassed by men in a bar until she dropped a glass ashtray on their leader’s skull. Hank Vilas remembers with visible remorse his drunken one-night stand in wartime Germany with his military friend who was then killed a few days later by sniper fire. And African-American activist/poet Audre Lorde effectively parses the way the gay movement joined forces with the civil rights movement. Unlike After Stonewall, this is a documentary that can tell the sometimes bitter truth and still conclude with an unambiguously heartening flourish. Henderson


Desert Hearts

Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, 1985)

The relationship at the core of Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts is contextualized by its characters’ ideological hang-ups, whether related to region, education, or sexuality, which inform the entire spectrum of their identities. The film reads between the lines of desire and self-assessment to locate the liminal place where the notion of personal identity begins and ends. That such a process entails convincing the self of its value as much it does convincing others is one of Deitch’s central arguments. At a casino, an unnamed woman leans over to Vivian (Helen Shaver), who’s scoping out the slot machines, and says that if one doesn’t play, one doesn’t win. Take that as the mantra of Desert Hearts, which advocates risk and consciousness in tandem as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative thought. Dillard


My Beautiful Laundrette

My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985)

While Robert Towne’s Personal Best and Arthur Hiller’s Making Love have faded into obscurity as Celluloid Closet footnotes, My Beautiful Laundrette has become a benchmark in the ‘80s New Queer Cinema. The film’s approach to portraying homosexuality is as much grounded in raw, sensual realism as some of the film’s other themes are in buoyant fantasy. That those other themes—racism, immigration, and economic Darwinism in Thatcher’s England—don’t inherently lend themselves to a lighthearted interpretation is an example of how Stephen Frears adapts the worldview of the characters he presents. Henderson

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Caravaggio

Caravaggio (Derek Jarman, 1986)

Swinging-London painter, music-video experimenter, outspoken gay-rights activist—the restless Derek Jarman got his start in films as a set designer for Ken Russell, and there’s something of the impudence (but not, thankfully, the hysteria) of Russell’s mock-biopics in Caravaggio. A pet project for the director (and his first collaboration with muse and friend Tilda Swinton), it outlines the life of the 17th-century painter (played by Nigel Terry) with flesh-bound recreations of his most famous canvases and deflating anachronism—motorcycles, typewriters and boxing matches abound. The film is visually ravishing, frequently funny, and entirely accessible in its view of artistic longing and achievement reflecting the struggles of gay men. Croce


Mala Noche

Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant, 1986)

Physically and spiritually, the characters of Mala Noche are in constant stasis, whether en route from Mexico to the States or from one dank apartment room to the next. Gus Van Sant’s gritty, dirty, lyrical, altogether sensual debut feature frames their homosexual existence as one of nomadic isolation, an identity constantly in flux and only preserved through a perpetual sense of redefinition; life is a crapshoot and its many necessities (food, shelter, love, companionship) are but luxuries that some win, some lose. The title is explicitly invoked by the narrating protagonist the morning after a rough one night stand, but the film goes one further and suggests that his existence as a whole is not unlike one prolonged act of fumbling in the dark. Rob Humanick


Parting Glances

Parting Glances (Bill Sherwood, 1986)

Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances, a hang-out movie with a cool, Fassbinderian sense of social observation, takes place in the 24-hour window leading up to Robert’s (John Bolger) departure for Africa as part of his job at a world health organization. His decision to leave has done a number on his lover, Michael (Richard Ganoung), and as we’re pulled from party to party, conversation to conversation, Sherwood offers up little dances of love and recrimination that give profound shape to everyone’s joys and insecurities. The theatrical precision of Sherwood’s script, namely his skill at elision, is matched by his formally tricky suturing of scenes, which often use bonkers sound cues to slyly and joyfully highlight his understanding of his characters as being representational, of their place in the history of gay culture, and of all the little dreams, both inside and outside of the movies, that they never got to live. Gonzalez


Law of Desire

Law of Desire (Pedro Almodóvar, 1987)

Law of Desire is less a title than a rule in Pedro Almodóvar’s thriller about Pablo (Eusebio Poncela), a stage director, and the psychotic rapist/serial killer (Antonio Banderas) who becomes fixated on him. The pair’s dimly lit, sweaty sex scenes contrast Almodóvar’s otherwise candy-colored visual preferences, like the expressionistic greens and reds that load the mise-en-scène and bleed into Pablo’s production of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, which Almodóvar would go on to adapt in 2020. Containing two of Almodóvar’s recurring emblems of masculinity (the libidinous artist and the sex-minded, psychopathic stud), the film intersects art and fucking in a manner that is further explored in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Bad Education. Dillard

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Maurice

Maurice (James Ivory, 1987)

No one wants to admit the erotic fuel that repression provides. Because, as with all things, too much of a good thing quickly becomes a very bad thing. No one knows this better than the Brits, which is why Merchant-Ivory’s Maurice (based on an E.M. Forster novel that remained unpublished until its author had died and, thereby, escaped having to answer for its content) buries its closest American counterpart: Brokeback Mountain. Unlike with the Oscar-grubbing Ang Lee film (which, no matter what anyone’s great aunt thinks, decidedly did not scare the horses), Maurice’s veneer of prestige filmmaking exerts a mighty counterpoint to the drama it houses, always daring to match external order with impetuous internal contentment. Henderson


Looking for Langston

Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien, 1989)

As a spiritual successor to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks, Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston visualizes a black, gay sexuality that refutes tepid histories of both the Harlem Renaissance and poet Langston Hughes—histories that would deny each of their homosexual identities. In doing so, Julien not only produces elliptical imagery that owes a great deal to Anger and Jean Cocteau, but questions the work of white, gay artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, whose imaging of nude black men positions them as fetishized, statuesque emblems of exotic fantasy. On the contrary, Julien places black men together within the frame and allows for the possibility of an embrace between bodies instead of objectifying them. Dillard


Tongues Untied

Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989)

Midway through Tongues Untied, director Marlon Riggs asks the film’s epitomizing question in verse: “Mother, do you know I roam alone at night? Wearing colognes, tight pants, chains of gold, searching for men to come back to candlelight…there is no tender mercy for men of color, for sons who love men like me.” In less than an hour of monologues about oppression, sequences of voguing set to house music, and lessons on how to snap like a diva, Tongues Untied furiously maintains a sense of performance art-as-activism by refusing to speak its outrage in any compromised or conventional manner. Dillard


The Garden

The Garden (Derek Jarman, 1990)

The Garden doesn’t foreclose the dream of a more serene world. Derek Jarman’s manipulation of the low-grade film stock draws out flickering oranges and reds from shots of the sky over a gray beach, and Michael Gough often speaks over close-ups on flames. The film’s images burn, yet Jarman understands that fire can symbolize both destruction and creation. After all, one burns the vestiges of last year’s crops before replanting, and The Garden isn’t without hope that we can regrow a paradise. A scene featuring the film’s central gay couple (Johnny Mills and Philip MacDonald) wearing pink tuxedos and holding an infant maintains the possibility of a different reality, one in which anti-gay hate has finally been snuffed out. Pat Brown

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Paris Is Burning

Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990)

In Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s celebrated snapshot of the late-‘80s New York drag-ball scene, such terms as “beauty” and “reality” become loose mercury, blurred like the identities of the black and Hispanic gay men hitting the drag houses every night. The documentary is right away upfront about the racial, social, and sexual politics of tucking in cocks and putting on dresses: “You’re black, you’re male, and you’re gay,” one queen says early on, recounting the three-strikes-you’re-out fringe status pressed on him since birth. The world of flaming, cross-dressing theater, then, can stand for an enclosed universe not just of communal acceptance, but also of mockery of the gender-rigidity of “normal” society. Croce


Madonna: Truth or Dare

Madonna: Truth or Dare (Alek Keshishian, 1991)

Released a year after Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, True or Dare is marinated in many of the same ideas surrounding gender, power, sexuality, and performance. And it aligns these ideas with a focus on gay rights. The film was the first time that many Madonna fans saw two men kissing. At one point, several of her dancers attend a gay pride parade in New York City, which is interspersed with footage of Oliver Crumes, the only straight male dancer in Madonna’s troupe, expressing his discomfort around gay men. The scene recognizes the ubiquity of homophobia while simultaneously centering the fight against it. And in one of the film’s most poignant moments, Madonna tears up as she delivers a pre-show prayer in honor of Keith Haring, who died of AIDS in 1990. Keith Watson


My Own Private Idaho

My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)

In My Own Private Idaho’s greatest and most legendary scene, Mike (River Phoenix) tries to tell Scott (Keanu Reeves) by a campfire that he loves him without telling him that he loves him. Phoenix’s naked, halting rhythms are a thing of ineffable beauty, and Reeves, an intuitive, underrated actor, fulfills the demanding task of subtly taking the measure of his co-star as the latter forges a trail toward behavioral profundity. At times, it seems as if Reeves and director Gus Van Sant are forming a protective fence around Phoenix across this bedrock of New Queer Cinema, and it’s this impression that gives this deeply moving film a tint of hope. Bowen


Poison

Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)

“Queerness” is not an intrinsic state of being, but a differential relationship to normative culture. So in an important sense queerness is identical with hegemonic oppression and social abjection. But the main characters in Poison aren’t simply casualties of an unjust world, the kind of lambs-to-the-slaughter you find in liberal prestige pictures about homophobia. Though all are victims of persecution and physical violence, each one internalizes and reproduces that hatred by becoming victimizers themselves. Their stories hash out a complex moral calculus. They’re sympathetic, but not at all saintly, and most often are impenetrable, antisocial, and repulsive. And no, they’re not “just like you.” That’s the last thing they want to be. Paul Brunick

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The Living End

The Living End (Gregg Araki, 1992)

Whether in the guerilla eruptions of The Living End or the pothead reveries of Smiley Face, Gregg Araki has long displayed a keen interest in young characters whose restless sexuality is but one element in the volatile cultural landscapes they find themselves in. A New Queer Cinema guiding light whose “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy (Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere) lent the indie ‘90s much of its anarchic energy and danger, his films have often given the feeling of an armageddon bubbling underneath their brash surfaces, a sense of dread nevertheless kept at bay by spiky humor and compassion. Croce


The Long Day Closes

The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)

Instead of the continuous threat of frustrated male violence represented by the abusive father in Distant Voices, Still Lives, Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes offers the tender, feminine cocoon personified by 11-year-old Bud’s (Leigh McCormack) beatified mother and a slew of affectionate brothers and sisters. Despite the warm communal setting, however, Bud is essentially a solitary figure, a shy, grave child who, like the filmmaker, experiences the first stirrings of homosexual desire along with the weight of Catholic guilt. And Davies braids the two elements by having the same actor appear as a shirtless bricklayer who responds to Bud’s gaze with a wink and the crucified Jesus who screams during one of the boy’s daydreams. Croce


Orlando

Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992)

It’s less than shocking to say that Tilda Swinton slips effortlessly into the role of the eponymous male nobleman, who awakens halfway through the film to find himself a woman. Orlando’s novelistic structuring devices play second fiddle to Sally Potter and Virginia Woolf’s dominant double vision of gender as both an ever-malleable construction shaped by the specific historical moment, and an enduring method of social control wielded by those in power (i.e., men). The film bustles with soprano-voiced male singers, unwieldy wigs, and costumes paraded by both sexes, and a memorably commanding Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp). A world of pageantry and primping, its members nevertheless divorce the porous boundaries between male and female social codes from the unequal levels of respect bestowed on each. Connolly


Blue

Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)

Blue is Derek Jarman’s last film, made in 1993 when the filmmaker was blind and dying of AIDS. In addition to its bold jests (the defiance of a dying man hanging on to humor to face the pearly gates), it features ruminations, remembrances, and assorted pensées spoken by Jarman over an unchanging blue screen. What keeps it from becoming a Warholian abstraction is its clear-eyed toughness, the way the words modulate from plummy to morbid to ethereal and the color of the screen seems to undulate with feeling (it alternately suggests the ocean, the sky, a burnt retina, the chill of death and transcendence). In this profoundly felt film, the contrast isn’t just between sound and image, but between its auteur’s failing body and his still-ardent mind. Raging and humbled, Jarman stares into the darkness and finds unlikely bliss—a fitting requiem for an artist who insisted on dying as he had lived, a searching maverick. Croce

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Totally F***ed Up

Totally F***ed Up (Gregg Araki, 1993)

Gregg Araki’s Brat Packers, far ruder and more vociferous than John Hughes’s, are a rainbow batch of teens muddling through the triple-whammy of adolescence, boredom, and uncloseted homosexuality in an unmellowed Los Angeles. For all the mumbled rants about AIDS and shitty relationships, most of Totally F***ed Up’s tone is spiky in its compassion and humor. The endings of the director’s “Teen Apocalypse” trilogy may seem utterly desolating, yet they all move toward a rejection of negativism in favor of the harsh but inescapable complexities of the world. Life is fucked up, Araki is saying, but it’s worth living. Croce


The Wedding Banquet

The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993)

Ang Lee’s farcical The Wedding Banquet focuses on the travails of a gay Manhattan couple, Wai-tung (Winston Chao) and Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), whose world is upended when Wai-tung’s traditional Taiwanese parents insist on marrying him off. Aiming to keep up a ruse, the couple decide to have Wai-tung marry the poor Wei Wei (May Chin), and the lie, as expected, leads to dramatic and hilarious ends. Unsatisfied with a courthouse affair, Wai-tung’s mother insists on an extravagant event, resulting in the lavish titular banquet. Pregnancy, illness, and truth-telling ensue, as Lee eases toward a climax of bittersweet uplift. R. Kurt Osenlund


Wild Reeds

Wild Reeds (André Téchiné, 1994)

André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds is a coming-of-age portrait of a group of teens at a Provence school in the early ’60s who are all touched by sexual confusion and the waning months of the French-Algerian war. François (Gaël Morel) is an honor student awakened to his homosexuality by the strapping Serge (Stéphane Rideau), a lunkish farmboy who consents to get off with him on one never-to-be-repeated night in the dorm. François’s best pal, Maïté (Élodie Bouchez), a committed communist who speaks precociously of the evils of men, is crushed by her friend’s new interest and wary of Serge’s attentions to her. The adolescent raw material here feels even more familiar than it was in 1994, but the turbulence embodied by the quartet of young actors is still natural, haunting, and imbued with authentic youthful terrors. Weber


The Celluloid Closet

The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1995)

Vito Russo’s invaluable research made for one hell of a book, but being a book about movies, it took Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman to make its devastating points sting. At no point did Russo mince words, but similarly, at no point did his book reach a crescendo of outrage as pointed as the moment Epstein and Friedman string together a revolting and epic montage of the times Hollywood punished its pathetically infrequent homosexual characters with death. As a testament to Clinton-era optimism for a brighter future, it’s cute. As an illustration of just how deep a hole Hollywood had to dig its way out of, it’s invaluable. Henderson

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Beautiful Thing

Beautiful Thing (Hettie MacDonald, 1996)

Hettie MacDonald’s Beautiful Thing is grounded in a realistic sense of adolescent agony and how it gives way to the rapture of new romance that. For all their attempts to paint gay life as being carefree, many of the beloved gay-youth movies released in the late ’90s (such as Edge of Seventeen and Get Real) completely missed this point. Instead of simply pinning it on his developing notions of his own sexuality, screenwriter Jonathan Harvey’s scenario makes the torment that only child Jaime (Glen Berry) goes through, upon attempting to start a romance with the hesitant Ste (Scott Neal), a much more universal and generic toil. Henderson


Bound

Bound (Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski, 1996)

Bound is, along with Showgirls, most responsible for bringing girl-on-girl action, hot and heavy, into mainstream cinema, though, in retrospect, it isn’t quite as cynical as it once seemed, in terms of pandering to the same moviegoers who took Paul Verhoeven’s landmark satire as straight (so to speak) sleaze. Time and extra-cinematic circumstances (the Wachowskis—a dynamic duo that once cultivated a quasi-frat-boy/fanboy image—have both come out as transgender) have reoriented Bound as less of a love letter to teenage boys and more of an earnest attempt at a LGBT-friendly noir, drunk on design rather than the softcore daydreams of some sniggering kid with hand lotion and half a box of tissues. Jaime N. Christley


The Delta

The Delta (Ira Sachs, 1996)

Ira Sachs’s debut feature may have the look and atmosphere of a seductive summertime daydream, but the spontaneous gay fling at the film’s center lies within a complex nexus of class, race, and sexuality. As the white, middle-class, and closeted teen Lincoln (Shayne Gray) and the poor, half-black/half-Vietnamese immigrant John (Thang Chan) journey down the Mississippi and away from a rigorously “traditional” Memphis, every one of the characters’ touches, kisses, libidinous urges, and other assorted actions (including a startling final act of violence) is born out of an unyielding social marginalization. Wes Greene


Happy Together

Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997)

Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together is a mass of contradictions. It’s a film mostly sour on love, but shot (by Christopher Doyle) as though filtered through the vehement rush of a newfound romanticism. It’s both fragmented and cyclical. It’s stiflingly claustrophobic and also brashly international. And it’s an intimate, interpersonal look at the forces that keep two men simultaneously joined and repelled like whirring magnets, filmed (at least subconsciously) on the cusp of a major national moment. Henderson

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My Life in Pink

My Life in Pink (Alain Berliner, 1997)

This is one of the only cinematic accounts of the gender non-conforming child that focuses on identification instead of sexuality per se. My Life in Pink is as much the story of a seven-year-old’s failure to adhere to his/her parents’ impossible demands as it is an indictment of hetero-centric parenting in general. While the brutality of child rearing is most evident in the queer child, it makes us wonder where the other kids of the family, Ludovic’s (Georges Du Fresne) siblings, must be hiding the corpses of the inner children they’ve had to kill in order to conform to the self-serving wishes of Mommy, Daddy, and the entire neighborhood. Semerene


The River

The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1997)

In Tsai Ming-liang’s The River, Hsiao-Kang’s (Lee Kang-sheng) mysterious neck pain gives way to a series of incestuous encounters, beginning with his mother (Lu Hsiao-ling) rubbing lotion on him and culminating in an accidental father-son handjob session at a Taipei bathhouse. Tsai is known for deliciously long takes where, drop by drop, one is drowned by the symbolic weight of a sequence. The bathhouse scene is no different, but it’s particularly haunting because father (Miao Tien) and son are oblivious to the literality of the incest for most of its duration, making the viewer the sole bearer of what seems to be at once a ticking time bomb and Hsiao-Kang’s only opportunity for paternal affection. Semerene


The Watermelon Woman

The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997)

The tension between uncovering hidden aspects of film history and respecting the lives of those contained within it form the undergirding conflict of Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, a film of such multitudinous interests and storytelling pursuits that its unfolding replicates the ecstasy of newfound romance. The film’s crux, beyond the blossoming lesbian relationship at its core, is Dunye’s aligning of hidden historiographies with the hassle of dating—of searching for something (or someone) that cannot be immediately seen with the naked eye. The film views Cheryl’s (Dunye) daily grind as a complex formation of potentially conflicting passions and motivations that has the potential to both reveal the past and shape her future. Dillard


Fucking Åmål

Fucking Åmål (Lukas Moodysson, 1998)

Åmål, a small Swedish town, is an emblem of oppression in Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Åmål, since the socially conservative hovel becomes a prison for the blossoming sexual relationship between a pair of teenage girls longing to escape for Stockholm. The film might still be Moodysson’s greatest expression of youthful strife, creating a world where you can be slitting your wrists at one moment and making out in a backseat to Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” in the next. Moreover, the film’s end credits offer Robyn’s “Show Me Love” as a definitively queer anthem of compassion in response to surrounding hatred. Dillard

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All About My Mother

All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

Social mores have shifted significantly since All About My Mother’s release, but it’s impressive how flagrantly transgressive it remains. The trans characters deal with gender dysphoria while also speaking defiantly about their bodies. Even at its wildest, though, this is one of Almodóvar’s most tender works. Buried within its characters’ forthright vulgarity is an invigorating refusal to succumb to the wearying effects of social ostracization and autoimmune disease. Rejected by blood relatives, the characters forge new families and communities with other outcasts. As floridly colored and brightly lit as any of his other films, All About My Mother is Almodóvar’s most loving tribute to women and an elegy for their ability to endure hardship. Jake Cole


Beau Travail

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

The French Foreign Legion soldiers in Beau Travail walk a tightrope between animal instinct and “unit cohesion,” a fascinating push and pull that Claire Denis exploits for erotic tension between an officious sergeant and a hot-headed (and, well, hot) troop who faces the jealous wrath of his higher-up. At times, the whole thing plays like an experimental film version of the sweaty workout sequences in Madonna’s “Express Yourself” music video: The Legion soldiers circle each other in a balletic rhythm that suggests either lovers getting ready to fuck or a hunter preparing to attack his prey. Denis sympathizes greatly with the daily turmoil of military life, and she likens the troops’ flux of emotions (like war itself) to a kind of dance. Paul Schrodt


Being John Malkovich

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)

Unlike American Beauty and Fight Club, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman aren’t content to merely score glib points on entitled, piggy Americans who’ll do anything to evade taking responsibility for their own lives. Being John Malkovich satirizes showbiz obsession while also successfully diagnosing self-loathing as the root of that obsession. John Cusack’s Craig wants the strange portal that leads to John Malkovich’s mind so that he can bed a woman that represents the epitome of his wildest erotic longings. Meanwhile, Cameron Diaz’s Lotte yearns for Malkovich so she can realize her repressed desires to be a man. The film is full of seemingly off-the-cuff jokes that enforce a poignant understanding that most people long to be famous because they otherwise don’t feel they deserve to have what they want. Bowen


O Fantasma

O Fantasma (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2000)

Desire is unabashedly compulsive and bestial in one of the finest films ever made about perversion. In João Pedro Rodrigues’s O Fantasma, Sergio (Ricardo Meneses) is a garbage man in a perpetual state of cruising, whether cladding a catsuit to fuck a man in handcuffs, climbing rooftops like a feline on the prowl, or using a shower hose like a leash to choke himself while masturbating. He surrenders to a violence that’s directed both at himself and astoundingly willing others, ending up literally digging his own hole in a remote garbage dump like an irrational organism retreating into the earth. Not even Freud provided such a vivid account of the death drive as Rodrigues does in his feature-length directorical debut. Semerene

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Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

Mulholland Drive’s famous audition scene is bookended when Laura Elena Harring’s Rita and Naomi Watts’s Betty have sex, the latter proclaiming her love for her new partner with an immediacy that’s movingly contrived until the truth imbues it with a deeper gravity. Like the audition scene, Rita and Betty’s coupling contains behavioral multitudes. Outwardly, it’s as erotic as Betty’s duet with Jimmy, the ultimate epitome of a fantasy of “lipstick” lesbians. Inwardly, it’s a sick woman’s desperate re-contextualizing of a relationship, cast in the ironically glamorous, male-centric hues of a Hollywood romance, though said glamour, for Lynch and cinematographer Peter Deming’s considerable formal power, has such a ferocious life of its own as to elude the strictures of any singular qualification. Bowen


Yossi & Jagger

Yossi & Jagger (Eytan Fox, 2002)

In Yossi & Jagger’s spare running time, director Eytan Fox strips away almost anything that doesn’t present a dichotomy of conflict. He lets the simple divisions of gay/straight, men/women, fast/slow, adventurous/reserved become the essence of the film’s ultimately tragic take on Israel’s policy of mandatory military service. Just as Yossi isn’t the only character that opts to keep his true feelings locked deep inside himself, Jagger’s tendencies to pursue personal fulfillment shows up in other characters, not least of which the female soldier with a hopelessly futile crush on Jagger, but also including the burgeoning gourmet chef who spends his military days slumming over meatball sushi. The crucial point, and what ultimately helps the film stand tall amid the overpopulated gay cinema ghetto, is that youth simply cannot be contained into an institution that thrives on the total annihilation of psychological ambiguities. Henderson


Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003)

The darkened spaces of the Fu-Ho Grand Theater in Goodbye, Dragon Inn chart the meanderings of several patrons, including a furtive moviegoer seeking a homosexual encounter, but director Tsai Ming-liang’s film isn’t simply a sentimental ode to a bygone era of cinematic exhibition. In fact, it’s a partial refutation of François Truffaut’s presumptuous claim that the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is the light reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience. By taking the screen’s command away from viewer attention, Tsai queers cinematic desire by identifying how such images and places have been historically reliant upon the affirming perceptions of a dominant socio-economic and sexual class. Dillard


Son Frère

Son Frère (Patrice Chéreau, 2003)

In Son Frère, Patrice Chéreau chronicles a desperate reconnect between two brothers (Bruno Todeschini and Eric Caravaca) when one is diagnosed with a mysterious blood disease. The man and woman at the center of Intimacy claw at each other like wild animals. In Son Frère, a straight man uses his failing body as a means to bridge the gap between himself and his younger gay sibling, who blames the other’s alleged homophobia for their separation. In both films, skin becomes a kind of existential burden. However old, taut, hairy, saggy, or cut up, it’s all the same: a gratuitous barrier that too often prevents us from crawling inside each other. Gonzalez

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Bad Education

Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004)

The best shot in Milk, of a stark-naked James Franco swimming in a pool, was taken from Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education, which was itself an allusion to the paintings of David Hockney, whose pop-art riffs on gay love can be read in nearly everything the two directors have done. But Almodóvar’s pastiche isn’t nearly as delicate as Van Sant’s, shattering as it does the romanticized erotica of Hockney’s images and exposing it for the farce that it is. You could say that Bad Education, the story of two Catholic school boys’ burgeoning affection for each other and the crippling power that a pedophilic priest holds over their future lives, is the director’s most cynical film. But ugly though the subject matter may be, Almodóvar’s narrative is also alive with feeling. In the end, the antidote to misery is the director’s own love for the movies. Schrodt


Mysterious Skin

Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004)

Swapping his usual gasoline rainbow of queer bacchanalia for a sultry, slowly simmering study of sublimated victimization, Gregg Araki nails the aura of poison surrounding events of child abuse with Mysterious Skin. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet—as the recklessly promiscuous, now-grown molestee and the nebbish sci-fi fan attempting to piece together one fatefully damaging night—excel at implying their hazily unholy union until the film’s anti-climax batters through the repressive floodgates, but it’s Araki’s strangely gentle imagery and eloquent comparison between the ineffability of pedophilia and extra-terrestrials that provide the film’s poetry. A shower of earthbound Froot Loops has never seemed so beautifully alien. Lanthier


Tropical Malady

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

If you want to be precise about it, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s inscrutably gorgeous piece of jungle fever is a bifurcated, horny phantasmagoria stemming from within the animal urges of two young male lovers, as formally liberated as their surprisingly lick-happy interpersonal interactions. But there’s no reason to put too fine a point on a movie with this much poetry to offer. In keeping with the profile of a knowing sensualist who still insists you call him Joe, Tropical Malady is a mysterious object that contains, at its core, an emotional bull’s eye. If there’s a cure for this, I don’t want it. Henderson


The Raspberry Reich

The Raspberry Reich (Bruce LaBruce, 2004)

The Raspberry Reich daringly conflates homosexuality and revolution in ways that question the Warholification of outsider class struggles. The film’s cute gay terrorists don’t exactly stake out territory as much as they stake each other out, frequently engaging in public sex. Director Bruce LaBruce uses this sex to confront the illusion of freedom in society, but he also understands the distraction it poses within the terrorist ranks, and as such the film works both as a counter-cultural assault on homosexist ideology and a comment on the way a revolution is often watered down and romanticized by the very media-obsessed bleeding hearts (like, say, Walter Salles) who are typically most interested in outsider politics. Gonzalez

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Wild Side

Wild Side (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2004)

Perhaps appropriate for a film about unconventional people and their unconventional lives, place and chronology is out of whack in Wild Side. From the dreary, people-less alleyways to the skies above his characters’ heads, Sébastien Lifshitz displaces emotion into the film’s environment, and while his collage of poetic visual asides and emotional exchanges courts effusiveness, the assemblage remains earnest and hauntingly expressive of a uniquely internal and expressive human turmoil. The playtime of two androgynous children seems to position itself as the paradise to the hell of a mother’s (Josiane Stoléru) looming death, with transgender sex worker Stéphanie (Stéphanie Michelini) and her two lovers, Mikhail (Edouard Nikitine) and Jamal (Yasmine Belmadi), trapped somewhere in the purgatory in between. Gonzalez


The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros

The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, 2005)

It’s taboo, particularly in Western culture, to seriously consider the developing sexual feelings of children, a subject most easily infantilized, sensationalized, or brushed under the carpet. What’s often lost in this swirl of knee-jerk “adult” protectiveness are the feelings of the child, which—raw though they may be—deserve to be included in the discussion rather than subsumed by argumentation. It’s to director Auraeus Solito and screenwriter Michiko Yamamoto’s credit that, throughout The Blossing of Maximo Oliveros, they view their characters through a quietly revolutionary queer perspective, portraying young Maximo’s (Nathan Lopez) pursuit of an adult policeman, childish though it may be, as a fervently religious quest. Keith Uhlich


Two Drifters

Two Drifters (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2005)

Like O Fantasma before it, perhaps the scariest film ever made about the compulsion of gay desire, Two Drifters’s sensual-spiritual plumbing is totally off the map; the former charts the topography of desire, the latter scopes the limits of our grief. João Pedro Rodrigues’s camera is mostly static, framed strikingly along every up-down-diagonal plane imaginable, evocative of his characters’ crash-into-me anxieties. After O Fantasma, Rodrigues continues to work on an almost elemental level, but his supposition of nature as a conduit for communication between people delves into deeper emotional terrain. Gonzalez


Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2006)

For some time after Brokeback Mountain’s release, you heard the same argument over and over: that it isn’t daring enough to merit the attention it got, that it was too emotionally constricted and aesthetically conservative—too Hollywood—and that its success is more a political than artistic triumph. But the film’s foursquare classicism is what makes it so genuinely subversive, much more so than movies that are frankly a lot more creatively adventurous. At the same time, though it’s an uncompromised, personal film compared with some of the socially significant predecessors it’s been compared to—Gentleman’s Agreement, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, and Philadelphia—and it will hold up better than those movies because its political agenda isn’t central but marginal, if in fact it truly even has one. Matt Zoller Seitz

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The Bubble

The Bubble (Eytan Fox, 2006)

At a performance of Bent in Tel Aviv, two young men, Noam (Ohad Knoller) and Ashraf (Youself Sweid), lock hands during the crucial scene when Max and Horst make love to each other without touching. Noam and Ashraf’s intimacy, though, isn’t only an acknowledgement of the progress gays have made since the Holocaust, but a private expression of their own impossible love. Eytan Fox’s The Bubble is a kissing cousin of the British version of Queer As Folk, wittily dramatizing what it’s like for gay men to live and love in Tel Aviv while demonstrating a rare desire to rouse social and racial awareness. Gonzalez


Before I Forget

Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot, 2007)

Were Rainer Werner Fassbinder still with us, would his twilight films be anything like Jacques Nolot’s? Roughly the same age as the late, great German wunderkind, Nolot displays little of Fassbinder’s cinematic invention yet shares with him a tough, rigorously unsentimental eye for human intimacy and alienation, particularly when said eye is directed at his old queer self. Indeed, in Before I Forget, the third panel of Nolot’s informal trilogy of French gay life (following L’Arrière Pays and Porn Theater), the filmmaker places his naked, sagging body in front of the camera in a “Here I am, take me or leave me” display that deliberately brings to mind Fassbinder’s own fearless self-exposure in his segment of Germany in Autumn. Croce


To Die Like a Man

To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)

A morose musical with few proper songs, this elegy to an aging Lisbon transgender woman is possessed by many of the same qualities that made João Pedro Rodrigues’s first two features (the gay-cruising odyssey O Fantasma and the Almodóvar-esque romantic melodrama Two Drifters) so special: queer ennui, nocturnal carnality, and a flamboyant visual style. But there’s even more on offer in To Die Like a Man, which frames itself as above all an expression of one character’s fraught emotional and physical transfiguration. The film’s impressionistic feel for images lead to at least one stunning set piece: a magical-realist sequence, bathed in red light, in which inhabitants of a secluded forest bliss-out to Baby Dee’s hymnal-like “Calvary.” Together in a kind of exile, Rodrigues’s characters form a surrogate family and find solace in the shared experience of their community that music—and the musical—represents. Sam C. Mac


In the Family

In the Family (Patrick Wang, 2011)

Patrick Wang’s In the Family is as intimate and affecting as it is sprawling and untamed. Nearly three hours in length, it’s characterized by carefully blocked, deeply focused scenes that unfold naturally, if perhaps uncomfortably, beholden only to life’s often overlapping, conflicting, and overwhelming emotions. The premise, concerning adoptive rights in a homophobic society, is unique for button-pushing potential, though Wang’s aims here are political only inasmuch as the political intersects with the moral. With no shortage of confidence, the film is remarkable for sidestepping bullet-point statements altogether to instead focus on the day-to-day causes and effects of our prejudices and the regulatory systems (social contracts, employment guidelines, family bonds) we frequently submit ourselves to. Humanick

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Tomboy

Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011)

Céline Sciamma renders visual some of the most complicated and elusive structures at work in the constitution of personhood (i.e., desire), and never in a sentimental or manipulative way. Tomboy is so effortlessly invested in its characters’ experiences to worry about “selling” us its story or “teaching” us its messages. Sciamma’s sensibility as a director, along with the masterful performance by Zoé Héran, keeps the film from making any overreaching or generalizing claims about gender, identity, or the sexuality of children. And yet we certainly “learn” from Tomboy just as much as we “like” it. The kind of sensuous apprenticeship borne out of the aftershock of an experience so emotional, so delicate, it refreshingly eludes us. Semerene


Weekend

Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011)

The quintessential tenet of romantic movies is that they feature characters who are kept apart by their own deceptions or brought together by their casting aside of all that bullshit and opening up to another kindred soul. If this seems especially true in gay relationships, and I’m not saying it actually is, then it’s a mark of progress that the otherwise wholly naturalistic Weekend chooses to embrace the fiction, especially given just how many other beacons of gay cinema opt to convey truth vis-à-vis the sorts of things we’ve been force-fed to accept as our reality: the pain of oppression, the tragedy of AIDS, the shallow escapism of candied softcore fantasies. Andrew Haigh’s sensitive, unfailingly aware feature isn’t a fearless repudiation of the “meet cute” archetype, but rather a bold, specific revision: “meet right.” Henderson


How to Survive a Plague

How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012)

While feature films like And the Band Played On portrayed gay activists as backdrop for bureaucratic squabbles and moral quandaries of straight politicians and epidemiologists, David France’s How to Survive a Plague sets the record straight: No one on Capitol Hill handed down salvation, as it was fought for, fiercely, as ACT UP and other activists faced down bigoted politicians, government agencies, and pharmaceutical giants, with demonstrations, sit-ins, and boycotts. By offering us a glimpse into the activists’ public actions, taking us behind the scenes at their meetings, and mixing in intimate footage, of home and hospital visits, and frank “then” and “now” interviews, detailing stories of coming out and illness, France delivers a haunting time capsule that captures survival and hope as much as it does despair. Ela Bittencourt


Laurence Anyways

Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan, 2012)

Laurence Anyways is so moving and romantic because Xavier Dolan has the daring to nearly toss off the issue of transsexuality between the couple at its center, Laurence (Melvil Poupoud) and Fred (Suzanne Clément), after a while. He treats Laurence’s desire to live as a woman as it would be treated in a perfect world: As no big whoop, and so the problems that remain between Laurence and Fred are the problems of…an everyday couple. In the tradition of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk, Dolan takes you so deeply into Laurence and Fred’s world that you begin to see other, “normal” characters as vicious interlopers. We don’t want these outsiders to break the spell these two cast and be denied this unmistakable passion. Bowen

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Eastern Boys

Eastern Boys (Robin Campillo, 2013)

Robin Campillo’s shapeshifting gay romance offers a penetrating interrogation of human nature, belonging, and the social structures that shape and constrain us. The bracing formalism of the film’s long, masterful opening scenes establish the complex transactional relationships at the film’s core, before Eastern Boys gradually yields to an impeccably shaded brand of humanism. It’s a film of unclear motives and ever-shifting boundaries, but Campillo continues to grasp toward comprehension even as answers become more elusive. Eastern Boys finds the personal and the political helplessly bound together, caught in a morally fraught tangle that neither well-intentioned authorities nor mere human compassion can straighten out. Christopher Gray


Stranger by the Lake

Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, 2013)

For those who think of the internet as the big bad enabler of a gay culture full of apathetic sex fiends perennially in cruising mode, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake reminds the viewer that there’s nothing necessarily digital about the will to cruise ad infinitum. More significantly, the film portrays cruising as a danger-seeking and astoundingly repetitive affair, intimately linked to death itself—or the qualities that it promises. And though its characters, including the comely Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), have a fondness for barebacking, this isn’t a film about HIV as fetish or as the ghostly monster hovering over gay sex. Desire itself, unattached to viruses or specificity of conduct, appears as monstrous enough. Semerene


Carol

Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)

There are images in this tale of two women in love that seethe with desire in ways that Todd Haynes has only hinted at before in his career, from a flexing, bare back to the eponymous housewife (Cate Blanchett) eating forkfuls of creamed spinach with impossible poise. Both Blanchett and Rooney Mara summon an immediate sense of kinship, empathy, and hunger for each other’s characters, communicated through practiced, graceful deliveries, eloquent gestures, and glances and gazes that seem to be understood as code. Haynes’s luminous aesthetic throughout Carol both suggests the old-fashioned nature of the romance that’s portrayed here, and a modern world stuck in the past, still unable to fully accept passions as simultaneously unique and familiar as those felt, and shared intimately, by Carol and Therese. Chris Cabin


Tangerine

Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015)

Sean Baker’s Tangerine, the story of a trans sex worker, Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), who rages her way through Los Angeles on a quest to confront her pimp boyfriend (James Ransone) and the girl he slept with while she was in jail, doesn’t lack for empathy. But its sense of compassion doesn’t arise from a direct confrontation of issues of sex, gender, and race as they pertain to the characters’ lives. Sin-Dee may be the target of anti-trans aggression at one point, but the moment is understood only as a portent of change in the character’s trajectory, rather than as a calculated infusion of anguish. Tangerine’s triumph is primarily a matter of style, a visionary revelation every bit as expressionistic as Sin-Dee’s electric sense of shade, but not far behind is the means by which the filmmakers transcend the boundaries of race and gender and sexual orientation by pretending as if they didn’t exist to begin with. Gonzalez

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Moonlight

Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)

Throughout Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, sex and kinship are treated as secrets among other people, bonding rituals that Chiron has been decisively and unfairly denied, as he’s been relegated to an asexual and solitary plane with his socially indoctrinated self-hatred. This is why the use of three actors (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes) to play the character proves so resonant. No matter who Chiron becomes, people can discern his core and brutally reject him until he preemptively rejects himself, finding comfort in echoes of the past, such as how his adult bed reminds him of the sheets in the guest room at Juan’s (Mahershala Ali) house. Moonlight is so profoundly moving because it refuses to condescend to Chiron’s misery with glibness, and this beautiful relentlessness scans as artistic reverence. Bowen


Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo

Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau, 2016)

In Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo, Paris is perfectly set up for the most electrifying orgies to take place but also for dealing with whatever consequences come out of them in the most rational manner. Two gay men (Geoffrey Couët and François Nambot) head to the hospital for post-exposure prophylaxis following an orgy with the same straight face one presents when going in for, say, a broken arm. Paris appears as an anti-Vegas of sorts, where instead of leaving the indignity of sex behind once it’s over, its delights are in fact never over because a commitment to pleasure is bound to produce it even in the most unlikely places. The Paris of the film isn’t just the one “we will always have” in some kind of fantastic future, but what we have right now—despite the dread of AIDS or the perverse fleetingness of human relationships. Semerene


God’s Own Country

God’s Own Country (Francis Lee, 2017)

Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country captures not only what masculinity does and how it comes undone, but the complex apparatus that keeps it into place: the family’s surveillance, the silence, the shame. Johnny’s (Josh O’Connor) contentious relationship with his ailing father (Ian Hart) adds profundity and credibility to the young man’s excursion into queerness, or into pleasure writ large. Lee suggests that to be a man is to play a miserable game of replacement and reenactment, with the son picking up where the father leaves off. It’s tenderness that’s ultimately aligned with life-giving strength, as in the way Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) resuscitates an almost dead newborn lamb by rubbing it like a mother would a child, or when Johnny musters enough courage to touch his father’s hand, as if for the first time. Semerene


Call Me by Your Name

Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)

In Call Me by Your Name, Luca Guadagnino is able to build a fully fleshed fantasy world, one we may refer to as literarily pornographic in the best sense of the term, akin to the most masterful word-making feats in cinema such as the mansion of unspeakable perversions in Saló: 120 Days of Sodom and Pink Narcissus. Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver’s (Armie Hammer) relationship would have risked falling flat were it not underpinned by the raw credibility of the most literal structures that house it. The house in Call Me by Your Name is a dream world where swimming pool water seems to render bodies permeable, effacing their borders while sparing the crisp integrity of book pages, and where living room couches pull parent and child together for either an orgasmic daily dose of German poetry, or the finest father-to-son speech in the history of cinema. Semerene

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BPM (Beats Per Minute)

BPM (Beats Per Minute) (Robin Campillo, 2017)

The queer art of survival through debauchery and improbable alliances meets the French gift for conversational sparring in Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute), which dramatizes the frantic lives of ACT UP activists in Paris in the early 1990s. The result is one gut-wrenching ode to joie de vivre—a political orgy of sorts where queer kinship is the only buffer zone keeping dying and desiring from becoming the exact same thing. An army of lovers debates without end, like cruising, as if trying to speak their way out of death, or into it, ultimately exacerbating human condition’s most basic tenet: brevity. The average heart rate indeed. The film places a believable love story at the very core of its militant bacchanalia, provoking precisely the type of identification, or recognition, that ACT UP’s theatrical activism aimed to forge. Semerene


Climax

Climax (Gaspar Noé, 2018)

Climax is less comedy than it is musical, and the film arrives at a rather profound message about how all incivility isn’t equal—how bias, like blight or beauty, is in eye of the beholder. As the young men and women of the film increasingly lose themselves to the effects of LSD, Gaspar Noé’s camera anchors itself to them in rhythmic lockstep, capturing every freak-out, recrimination, stolen kiss, and betrayal in what is a miracle of synchronicity. In an extraordinary sequence, the camera locks on to the group’s de facto leader, Selva (Sofia Boutella), as if in a trance, following her as she submits to the throes of a Possession-inspired freak-out, and all the way to her collecting herself and walking past Taylor (Taylor Kastle) as he contorts his body into what seems like an optical illusion. The ultimate gag—no, masterstroke—of Noé’s career may be this perfect communion between his art and that of these bodies: a thrilling expression of the fear that to stop moving is to undo the social fabric of the world. Gonzalez


Tomboy

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)

Throughout Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma contrasts Marianne’s Noémie Merlant) technically skilled gestures with the demure, conventional poses of 18th-century female portraiture in which she’s trying to capture the enigmatic Héloïse (Ad¡ele Haenel). Though these techniques seem to have won Marianne a degree of liberty, they’re also tools of oppression: Héloïse’s image is to be sent to a suitor in Milan, who will marry her if he likes what he sees. The budding romance between the two women breaks this oppressive mold, and the two are able to construct an all too brief lover’s utopia within the lonely, isolated sphere of pre-Revolutionary womanhood. Set on the precipice of the Romantic era, this at once muted and scintillating isn’t just about forgotten female artists and lost love, but also about the difference between art as an economic tool and as an encoding of personal memory and feeling. Brown


Days

Days (Tsai Ming-liang, 2020)

In a series of tableaux vivants, where the camera remains mostly still and sound is entirely diegetic, the uneventful days of the two men unfold, or, considering Days’s meticulous attention to such elements as water and fire, you could say that they burn slowly. Indeed, the younger man (Anong Houngheuangsy) stokes the embers of a fire so he can methodically make his lunch, washing vegetables and fish in buckets inside his bathroom and concocting a makeshift stove by placing a pot on top of the other one containing the embers. The older man (Lee Kang-sheng), in turn, is seen taking a bath, stretching his sore body in the woods, and staring out a window for what feels like an entire afternoon, as he listens to the sound of water. Were Lee facing the lens, the sequence would belong to the same documentary universe of Wang Xiaoshuai or Sergei Loznitsa—of evidence through dogged visual persistence. Diego Semerene

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