Directed by Shu Lea Cheang • 1994 • United States
Starring Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim
Taiwanese-born new-media visionary Shu Lea Cheang directs this avant-anarcho ecosatire, in which a lesbian couple living on Staten Island find themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involvin...
Iranian American writer-director-actor Desiree Akhavan has been hailed for her bold depictions of female sexuality and queer identity, both in her two feature films and in her acclaimed television series “The Bisexual.” Brash yet empathetic, Akhavan explores the journey of a young queer woman who...
The mundane is rendered miraculous in these richly impressionistic evocations of the inner worlds of young boys grappling with questions of sexuality, identity, and religion. Director Terrance Daye drew inspiration from growing up Black and queer in a religious household to create his lyrical pri...
Directed by Kimberly Peirce • 1999 • United States
Starring Hilary Swank, Chloë Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard
Kimberly Peirce’s dramatization of the tragic true story of Brandon Teena—a young trans man living in rural Nebraska who was murdered in a vicious hate crime—brought the 1990s New Queer Cinem...
Directed by Desiree Akhavan • 2018 • United States, United Kingdom
Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, John Gallagher Jr., Sasha Lane
In 1993, teenager Cameron (Chloë Grace Moretz) is sent to a conversion-therapy center after being caught with another girl in the back seat of a car on prom night. Run b...
Directed by Elegance Bratton • 2019 • United States
Starring Krystal Dixon, DeSean Irby, Jusheem Thorne
Elegance Bratton’s powerfully empathetic documentary is an immersion into the lives of the homeless queer and transgender youth who have forged a community of their own on downtown Manhattan’s...
Directed by Ettore Scola • 1977 • Italy
Starring Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni
Italian cinema dream team Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are cast against glamorous type and deliver two of the finest performances of their careers in this moving, quietly subversive drama from Ettore Sco...
Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1967 • United States
Starring Jason Holliday
On the night of December 2, 1966, Shirley Clarke and a tiny crew convened in her apartment at the Hotel Chelsea to make a film. For twelve straight hours, they filmed the one-and-only Jason Holliday as he spun tales, sang,...
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1982 • Germany
Starring Brad Davis, Franco Nero, Jeanne Moreau
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film is a deliriously stylized tale of hothouse lust and simmering violence. Set amid an expressionistic soundstage vision of a French sea port, this da...
Criterion Collection Edition #789
Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years, Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs was for decades mainly the stuff of legend; that changed when Aaron Brookner, the late dir...
Directed by Derek Jarman • 1978 • United Kingdom
Starring Jenny Runacre, Little Nell, Toyah Willcox
When Queen Elizabeth I asks her court alchemist to show her England in the future, she’s transported 400 years to a post-apocalyptic wasteland of roving girl gangs, an all-powerful media mogul, fa...
Criterion Collection Edition #902
Donna Deitch's swooning and sensual first narrative feature, DESERT HEARTS, was groundbreaking upon its release in 1985: a love story about two women, made entirely independently, on a shoestring budget, by a woman. In this 1959-set film, adapted from a belove...
Criterion Collection Edition #557
A true twentieth-century trailblazer, Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the wo...
For Michelle Parkerson, filmmaking and activism are inextricably entwined. Using her camera to bring untold stories of Black and queer female identity to the screen as a producer and director, Parkerson has profiled trailblazing performers and activists such as influential jazz singer Betty Carte...
Criterion Collection Edition #407
With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant’s debut feature MALA NOCHE heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient wo...
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1978 • West Germany
Starring Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John
This heartrendingly compassionate tragedy from Rainer Werner Fassbinder traces the final days in the life of Elvira (Volker Spengler), a transgender woman spurned by her former lover...
Queer love and desire smolder behind bars in these unconventional holiday tales. Harry Lighton’s expectation-defying short WREN BOYS spins off in increasingly surprising directions as it unravels the relationships between an incarcerated man, his boyfriend on the outside, and an Irish Catholic pr...
Criterion Collection Edition #622
This sensual, remarkably observed, beautifully acted wonder is the breakout feature from British writer-director-editor Andrew Haigh. Rarely has a film been as honest about sexuality—in both depiction and discussion—as this tale of a one-night stand that devel...
Directed by Leilah Weinraub • 2018 • United States
Charting the eight-year run of Shakedown, a peripatetic black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles, director Leilah Weinraub attempts “to portray the before and after of a utopic moment.” Weinraub presents a world unto itself, shaped by the desires...
Directed by Basil Dearden • 1961 • United Kingdom
An extraordinary performance by Dirk Bogarde grounds this intense, sobering indictment of early-sixties social intolerance and sexual puritanism. Bogarde plays Melville Farr, a married barrister who is one of a large group of closeted London men ...
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • France
In her provocative first feature, Chantal Akerman stars as an aimless young woman who leaves self-imposed isolation to embark on a road trip that leads to lonely love affairs with a male truck driver and a former girlfriend. With its famous real-time c...
Directed by Barbara Hammer • 1982 • United States
An incredible document of the LGBT film scene in the early 1980s (as well as artist Barbara Hammer’s off-the-charts charisma), AUDIENCE finds Hammer working in a more straightforward documentary mode than usual. Hammer interviews her largely lesb...
Directed by Naïla Guiguet • 2020 • France
Starring Dustin Muchuvitz, Félix Maritaud, Raya Martigny
In an abandoned warehouse, a crowd—including a young transgender woman and her boyfriend—dances as one to techno music. As the night wears on, collective hysteria morphs into sweet melancholy, and ...
For decades, the queer experience on-screen was defined by invisibility and marginalization. The trailblazing works of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have been instrumental in changing that. Since the 1970s, when he contributed to the Mariposa Collective’s WORD IS OUT—a landmark documentary tha...
