One detractor called it “a Shawshank Redemption for progressive millennials”. But the force of Céline Sciamma’s lesbian love story about an artist and her unwitting sitter on a remote island in 18th-century Brittany is undeniable. As is the integrity of its central dynamic, stripped of power imbalances, hierarchies – and men.
A low-budget, high-kitsch, torn-from-the-headlines football fantasy about a Ronaldo-esque football star who hallucinates giant pekingese puppies frolicking on the pitch whenever he scores. Throw in a cross-dressing refugee subplot, lesbian spies and a far-right cloning conspiracy and you have a goofy and irrepressible testament to intersectionality.
Jane Schoenbrun became an A24 sensation with I Saw the TV Glow in 2024, but it is her previous film, a bare-bones chiller about an online horror game, that remains her most original work. Less instantly legible as a trans allegory than her follow-up, perhaps, but all the more disquieting for that.
Veteran Canadian provocateur Bruce LaBruce turns Pasolini’s 1968 Theorem into a radical rage against anti-immigrant rhetoric. A gooey Black alien washes up on the banks of the Thames ready to seduce the five members of a London bourgeois household from patriarch to maid. The sex scenes aren’t simulated. Let’s pray the coprophagy is.
The marketing campaign pitched director Campbell X’s punchy debut as a love story about a butch stud and her femme sex-worker girlfriend, but it is more complicated and original than that: a rallying cry for queer solidarity, a hymn to the friendship between lesbians and gay men, and a celebration of Black British queerness with walk-ons from David McAlmont, Dean Atta, Jay Bernard and Topher Campbell.
Queer cinema finally got its Annie Hall with co-writer, director and star Desiree Akhavan’s wise and hilarious debut. She plays a bisexual “boner-killer” looking back on a failed lesbian relationship. Akhavan skewers everything from the banter at a Persian wedding and the competitive horror of bumping into your ex when you are both out on the arm of your latest squeeze to the very Brooklyn problem of who gets first dibs on attending a discussion group about anti-LGBTQ+ bias in the legal system.
Ira Sachs used his own doomed real-life romance with the literary agent Bill Clegg as the basis for this brutally frank portrait of compulsion, addiction and heartbreak. An early sex scene, one of the most unvarnished in cinema history, proves that, sometimes, shit happens.
A buddy movie with three heroes: a young Jack-the-lad, a trans lawyer working for the NGO Pink Life and a retired teacher scouring Istanbul’s queer neighbourhoods searching for her trans niece. Levan Akin’s richly compassionate drama uses long-lens cinematography and neorealist techniques to show both the vitality and loneliness of city life.
Lyle Kash’s vivid and original debut cocks a snook at the idea that trans film-makers are duty bound to represent the trans experience. When the captain of a lesbian bowling team takes her own life, the ensuing melodramatic beats – the reading of the will, the discovery of a treasure map, the emergence of a long-lost son – collide with a queer aesthetic (Almodóvar,John Waters), Kash’s deadpan sensibility and one of the largest majority trans and non-binary casts in film history.
Anyone craving “queer joy” should steer clear of Oliver Hermanus’s masterful character study of a self-loathing, closeted white Afrikaner obsessed with a handsome young law student. In its single-minded intensity and mounting horror, it’s nothing short of a gay, South African Taxi Driver.
Not merely a film that knows it’s a film but an adaptation that knows it’s an adaptation, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli’s cool, confident second feature (after her semi-documentary Empathy) concerns a queer Brooklyn house-share in which the polyamorous inhabitants eat, sleep, protest, have sex, make art – and work on a film of Ronald M Schernikau’s utopian novel So Schön. Which, in turn, is exactly what So Pretty is.
João Pedro Rodrigues has been the by-appointment purveyor of transgressive cinematic phantasmagorias for more than two decades. For confrontational charge and visual eloquence, his debut – a fetishistic psychological thriller about a horny rubbish collector prowling Lisbon for sex in a Latex bodysuit – takes the cake.
An “incel”, a trans sex worker and a Terf … No, not the start of a bad-taste gag but just some of the characters in Louise Weard’s highly charged, handheld epic of Vancouver life in the margins. Part One clocks in at four-and-a-half hours, and there are at least another eight hours still to come. Maybe the finished article will turn out to be the greatest queer work of our time – if such binary categorisations weren’t, like, totally normie.
In what resembles a sexually-explicit, ketamine-dazed movie-length episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, writer-director Sebastián Silva plays himself as a prissy grouch harassed during a gay beach getaway by comic and social media star Jordan Firstman – a hyperactive attention-seeker with all the social graces of Donkey from Shrek. The film then takes a macabre and gasp-inducing turn. Abrasive and outrageous.
All of Us Strangers merits a place on this list, too. But it is Andrew Haigh’s breakthrough second film – about a Nottingham one-night-stand morphing into a life-changing two-day romance – which remains his most piercing work. Apparently conventional in structure, it actually takes some bold liberties, not least in the way one of the main characters rails against the ubiquity of heterosexual narratives. It’s as if he is willing Weekend into existence before our very eyes.
When unhappily married mother Cate Blanchett misplaces her gloves in the department store in early-1950s New York where shop assistant Rooney Mara works, it doubles as the throwing down of a gauntlet, and a provocation to the audience: do you dare reach for the life you want? Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt,Carolisn’t quite Todd Haynes’s masterpiece (that would be Safe, from 1995) but it’s as near as dammit. Carter Burwell’s score has a snake-charmer’s seductiveness, while Ed Lachman’s 16mm cinematography frames the lovers behind glass, smoke and other obstacles, making the viewing experience as tantalising as hearing a tender ballad on a tin-pot transistor radio.
“You need to pop that damn cherry, yo!” Coming-out movies are 10 a penny but Dee Rees’s autobiographical debut, extended from her own 2007 short, is scorchingly fresh. As the teenager tentatively emerging from the closet and into New York’s lesbian club scene, the stunning Adepero Oduye nails both the breathless excitement and the cringe of being queer and horny in a world that wasn’t built for you. “They didn’t have brown?” she says, aghast at the mismatch between her own skin and the colour of the strap-on acquired for her by a well-meaning friend.
“We’re all born naked and the rest is drag,” sang RuPaul. Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s challenging thriller, stymied and disowned by the queer joy mafia but adored by John Waters, Bret Easton Ellis and Bruce LaBruce, makes that point brilliantly. Weeks after being the victim of a homophobic attack, drag queen Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) spots his attacker (George MacKay) in a gay sauna, and contrives a revenge plan that plunges them both into the shark-infested waters of one another’s worlds.
Peter Strickland’s third feature, a rapturous and devilishly funny study of a lesbian sub/dom relationship, asks how transgressive or nonconformist appetites survive in everyday life. Sidse Babbett Knudsen is the seemingly imperious dom who would sometimes rather snuggle up in her PJs than wield the whip hand over her sub partner (Chiara D’Anna). Dripping with sensuality (there is even a “Perfume by …” credit in the opening title sequence), the specifics in Strickland’s portrait of “compromise, consent and coercion” are magically universal, applicable to any relationship.
Cinema is safe – or rather, dazzlingly dangerous – in the hands of Vera Drew. Her re-imagining of Joker as a trans coming-out fable is the boldest queer debut since Superstar, Todd Haynes’s Barbie-doll biopic of Karen Carpenter. Drew shot her film in five days then spent several years collaborating with umpteen animators and effects artists on different continents to create its dense visual texture. She stars as the wannabe Gotham City comic who launches a comedy club with The Penguin, falls for fellow trans standup Mr J (modelled on Jared Leto’s Joker from Suicide Squad) and finally confronts Batman, billionaire groomer of teenage boys.
What if the stranger you hooked up with on a brief Barcelona jaunt turned out to be a figure from your distant past? With a daring use of flashback and a plangent yet playful mood, Lucio Castro’s tale of two men across two decades in one city combines the coolness of Antonioni with the ache of Before Sunrise. The dance/make-out scene to Space Age Love Song by A Flock of Seagulls is euphoric, the film’s ending breathtakingly profound.
Any of Tsai Ming-liang’s 21st-century films could have ended up on this rundown. But Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a singularly spellbinding achievement, set on the last day of business at a cavernous Taipei picture palace. The camera is alert to each twitch and fidget of the clientele who move from seat to seat like chess pieces in the sparsely populated auditorium. The cruising vibe is at its most pronounced, and its most wickedly funny, in a long sequence in the gents’ toilets.
Jenni Olson proves herself the unassuming heir toChantal Akermanin this perfectly calibrated essay film that interweaves California’s bloody history with Olson’s (semi-fictionalised) romantic imbroglios and the tangled roots of her cinematic obsessions – all expressed in a sanguine narration over atmospheric street-and-landscape shots. In a line that captures the essence of queer cinephilia, Olson says: “Experiencing myself as a fictional character has been a mode of survival for me.”
Silas Howard and Harry Dodge co-write, direct and star in a twitchy queer caper that celebrates trans masc identity more passionately than any film before it. Shy (Howard) sets out to help his newfound pal Valentine (Dodge) track down his biological mother; along the way, vending machines get boosted and convenience store stick-ups go awry while butch lesbian, trans masc and non-binary viewers get the empathy and representation of which they had long been starved, plus lashings of sex, wit and wildness. Val’s rhapsodic monologue about Shy – “I met a guy! He was very small! He was a little running-away guy! He was a good-guy guy! He was splendid …” – is an endlessly quotable all-timer.
It’s an age-old story: boy meets boy, boy seemingly turns into ravenous jungle beast and is then hunted through the balmy verdant undergrowth.Apichatpong Weerasethakulwon the Palme d’Or with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives but it is Tropical Malady (in which Uncle Boonmee himself is namechecked six whole years before getting his own film) that remains his masterpiece. Complete with extended sexy-funny courtship, a talking monkey and a bovine ghost, it is an enigmatic puzzle of a film, bisected by a narrative schism reminiscent of Performance or Mulholland Drive. What exactly is queer cinema?This.
It Used to Be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema by Ryan Gilbey is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Ryan Gilbey will be in conversation with Guardian theatre critic Arifa Akbar at the Cinema Museum, London, on 15 June, and with director Peter Strickland after a screening of The Duke of Burgundy at the Garden Cinema, London, on 18 June