Films like , and have brought much-needed representation to the big screen, while delivering staggering cinematic experiences. But with queer cinema flourishing, which movies are most beloved for the light they shine on lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans experiences? We asked and Time Out contributors to share with us their favourite LGBTQ movies. So without further ado, here's our out-and-proud list of the 50 best LGBT films. MacLaine and Hepburn play the proprietors of a prestigious all-girls school who are forced to close when an especially psychotic little brat claims she saw them kissing. Hepburn was sold as the movie's star — she's the dainty, glamorous one with the macho boyfriend James Garner. But it's MacLaine who stands out, as the determined bachelorette forced to face a few things she's been hiding from herself. The supporting performances are stunning, especially Miriam Hopkins as MacLaine's voracious aunt, and it's lovely and, even in 2015, unusual to see a movie so dominated by women, with Garner the only guy who gets more than a line or two. In 1980s Madrid, young filmmaker Enrique Goded Fele Martínez is looking for a story for his next film. He brings with him a script, a revenge fantasy loosely based on their abuse by a priest at school. The story that follows is almost impossible to summarise, as Almodóvar takes us on a virtuoso spin from camp to noir. CC Director: Lukas Moodysson Cast: Alexandra Dahlström, Rebecka Liljeberg, Erica Carlson This is a heart-melting romantic classic from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. The difference here is that the rebel in question, Elin Alexandra Dahlström , is a girl in Agnes's high school who might not share her romantic feelings. A film that feels less like a two-dimensional experience and more like living someone else's life for 89 minutes, 'Show Me Love' is one of the all-time great teen dramas, exploding with life, insight and warmth. TH Director: Abdellatif Kechiche Cast: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux This aching, passionate and sex-heavy French film's two young stars shared the Cannes Film Festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, with its writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche in 2013, and rightly so. Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux give performances for the ages as Adèle, a schoolgirl, and Emma, a slightly older art student, who meet and fall in love. Kechiche traces the details and movements of their relationship with forensic attention, including the sex — dividing opinion on whether he's deeply empathetic or exploitative. Whatever your take, it's hard to deny the power of his portrait of falling in love — time itself seems to stop in scenes of the pair's early courtship. DC Director: Dee Rees Cast: Adepero Oduye, Kim Wayans, Aasha Davis Dee Rees's Brooklyn-set 2011 feature is the story of butch African-American lesbian teenager Alike Adepero Oduye as she tries to deal with feelings that increasingly put her at odds with her family check out her mother's aghast response to things like Alike's preference for boys' underwear. The influence of religion in the family's life is also crucial — though that nice new girl at church doesn't exactly turn out to be the straight-and-narrow influence Mom had in mind. Expanded from a short film with the help of executive producer Spike Lee. BW Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini Cast: Silvana Mangano, Terence Stamp, Massimo Girotti As its title suggests, Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 fable has the formal rigour of an experiment. Working with professional actors for the first time, the radical Italian director sets a cat among the pigeons of bourgeois family life in the preternaturally beautiful shape of Terence Stamp. His enigmatic, sexually omnivorous, possibly angelic visitor has sex with each member of a household in turn — mother, father, daughter, son and maid — upending their lives in the process. The results are wildly various but universally queer compared to everyday conformity: the comfortable deceptions of domesticity give way to the harsh purity of the desert. Treasure Yolonda Lee is a juvenile inmate who engineers a transfer to adult jail hoping to find her birth mother. Instead she finds herself navigating a daunting world of aggression, intimacy, religion, politics and an unforgiving pecking order. Initially a student project, it surveys with acuteness and sensitivity the underground scene that facilitated community and expression for many who were disenfranchised by their sexuality, gender identity, ethnicity and poverty. It also gave the world vogueing, as demonstrated by the legendary likes of Pepper LaBeija, Willi Ninja and Angie Xtravaganza, who are among the revelatory interviews. Tall, lunkish Texan Joe Buck Jon Voight, in his best ever role comes to the city with dreams of becoming a gigolo to society ladies, but gets more attention in the lonelier corners of the gay community. GL Director: Lisa Cholodenko Cast: Radha Mitchell, Ally Sheedy Anyone fascinated with the New York art scene is urged to pick up this cool, calculating romance based loosely on the life and work of photographer Nan Goldin. TH Director: Victor Fleming Cast: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger The story, on the surface, doesn't hold any obvious LGBT significance: it's the simple fantasy of a country girl, Dorothy Judy Garland , who encounters a magical land after she receives a bump on the head during a storm. Cultural theorists have spent many hours debating the answer to that question, with some suggesting that it's simply a matter of camp and others digging deeper and equating the black-and-white conservatism of the film's Kansas scenes to repression and even homophobia, and the colour and energy of Oz to being out and proud. Whatever the reason, somehow it just makes sense. DC Director: Bill Sherwood Cast: John Bolger, Richard Ganoung, Steve Buscemi Shot in 1984, Bill Sherwood's feature — the only film he completed before his death from an Aids-related illness aged just 37 — was one of the first films to deal directly with the disease. Set over just 24 hours, it's pegged to the relationship between Robert John Bolger and Michael Richard Ganoung , though the latter's ailing ex Nick an early lead role for Steve Buscemi is also central. BW Director: Harry Dodge, Silas Howard Cast: Silas Howard, Harry Dodge, Stanya Kahn Harry Dodge and Silas Howard's 2001 debut feature caused quite a splash at the Sundance Film Festival, offering a window into kinds of experience that arguably remain marginalised even within queer life. Howard plays trans man Shy while Dodge is butch dyke Valentine. The result is a heady and distinctive mix of working-class truthfulness and magic realism, created with the help of early digital video technology. For many without experience of the crisis, it opened a window onto the realities of Aids-related illness. The group publicly protested against the French government and the pharmaceutical companies for their slow responses to the pandemic. In this febrile setting, an increasingly tender romance blossoms with sparky activist Sean Pérez Biscayart. AK Director: James Bidgood Cast: Don Brooks, Bobby Kendall, Charles Ludlam Goings-on behind closed doors have always been part of the LGBT experience — including LGBT filmmaking. Throughout the 1960s, James Bidgood shot a series of no-budget luxurious fantasias on 8mm film in his New York apartment, featuring hot young thing Bobby Kendall in such guises as a sexy matador, a sexy belly dancer and a sexy slave boy. Their ability to quicken the pulse while retaining a kind of kitsch innocence made them an influence on French artists Pierre et Gilles, among others. The complexities of his situation and his internal and external crisis of masculinity are sharply matched and cut down by moments of kindness, Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monáe both deliver heartfelt performances. The burgeoning — and conflicted — relationship between Chiron and Kevin is the sort of romance that, while filled with strife, is also overrun with possibility. It opens as two friends, students Encolpio Martin Potter and Ascilto Hiram Keller , quarrel over a beautiful young boy Max Born. In the pursuit of pleasure, decadence piles upon decadence — never has the term Felliniesque been so appropriate. CC Director: Derek Jarman Cast: Steven Waddington, Andrew Tiernan, Tilda Swinton Derek Jarman's typically eccentric spin on Christopher Marlowe's 1593 play about the doomed fourteenth-century king played by Steven Waddington catapults the present into the past — not least by having protesters from the pressure group Outrage playing characters in the drama. In exploring Edward II's sexual relationship with the unpopular Piers Gaveston Andrew Tiernan — a rare example of a gay romance in the literature of the time — Jarman lashes out at establishment forces then and now. Jarman's interest is more modern than historical, but he forcefully and playfully makes his point about homophobia through the ages. DC Director: John Waters Cast: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce A lot of LGBT films ask mainstream audiences for sympathy, understanding, even pity. That ain't John Waters's style. In his delirious realm of bad taste, it's the straights who deserve pity for their intolerably timid stifling conformity while the freaks live it up on their own grotesque terms. Cue sex, drugs, murder, cannibalism, fame and — how could we forget — the shit-eating grin to end them all. BW Director: Terence Davies Cast: Terry O'Sullivan, Wilfrid Brambell As the title suggests, this isn't a single film but a trio of interlinked shorts, three portraits of the artist as a young, middle-aged and old man. The result is self-reflective, for sure, but far from self-indulgent. Davies is offering audiences a glimpse into his life in the hope that it'll offer some note of comfort, companionship or clarity as they wrestle their own demons. The master becomes a slave and when Karin breaks it off, Petra sinks into self-pity. While both films feature the farming of sheep and two men who, while camping in the hinterland, share an intense sexual and romantic bond, the similarities end there. Their unlikely love affair will melt even the most jaded of hearts. AK Director: Luchino Visconti Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Romolo Valli, Mark Burns Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti adapted Thomas Mann's 1912 novella in 1971, keeping the pre-World War I Venice Lido setting but centring on a composer rather than a writer. He is troubled, unwell Gustav Dirk Bogarde , an ageing man increasingly obsessed with a young blonde male hotel guest. Mann's more philosophical enquiries are watered down to offer a good-looking and atmospheric study in one man's late-life longing for unreachable beauty and youth. There's something undeniably shallow about Visconti's film although the Mahler on the soundtrack eases the feeling of repetition , but there's no mistaking the sadness and lost opportunities at its core. Here was a film centred on a lesbian relationship but directed by two male movie nerds, a product of the post-Tarantino irony boom in which a gay relationship was used as a shock tactic to make an otherwise traditional crime flick stand out from the crowd. Turns out he isn't the only one with a few things to learn. BW Director: Kenneth Anger Cast: Ernie Allo, Bruce Byron, Frank Carifi Kenneth Anger's half-hour 1963 joyride can lay claim to a whole bunch of firsts: it was the first movie to mash up 1950s biker culture with the story of Jesus, as well as pioneering the use of pre-existing pop songs to score a picture including the likes of Blue Velvet and Wipe Out. BW Director: James Ivory Cast: James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Hugh Grant This 1987 Merchant-Ivory film is based on an EM Forster novel published in 1971, a year after the author's death, but written over five decades earlier and assumed unpublishable by the writer. Forster wrote the first version of 'Maurice' in 1913, roughly the time events are set, and it tells of a love affair between two Cambridge students, Maurice James Wilby and Clive Hugh Grant , which becomes more complicated once each of them leaves university. While Clive marries and seeks political office, an increasingly troubled Maurice refuses to discard his feelings, leading to a dangerous considering the legal and social binds of the time affair with a gamekeeper Rupert Graves. The story is heartbreaking but also radical for offering an ending which suggests happiness — however isolated — in a same-sex relationship that crosses the class divide. GL Director: Matthew Warchus Cast: Bill Nighy, Dominic West, Andrew Scott In 1984, when the miners went on strike people got together all around the UK to raise money for the miners and their families. Calling themselves LGSM Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners , they set off from London in two minibuses and a clapped-out campervan to a village in South Wales carrying buckets of loose change raised in gay clubs. Set around a birthday party, it's one of the first features dealing with gay life on its own terms, including copious boozing, relationship strains and lacerating self-recombination. It's noteworthy for some electrifying performances, transplanted from the stage — playwright Mart Crowley adapted his own hit play — and location footage shot at Julius, now the oldest surviving gay bar in Manhattan. TH Director: Stephen Daldry Cast: Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore Rarely has Hollywood given us such complex and compelling female characters. Nicole Kidman is Virginia Woolf, working on Mrs Dalloway in the early 1920s and feeling herself slip into a breakdown. Julianne Moore is a depressed housewife in 1950s California, slowly suffocated by frustrated desires — recklessly, she kisses the woman who lives next door. In the here and now, Meryl Streep is a New York editor who lives with a woman but is caring for her ex-lover, a poet dying of Aids. The enfant terrible of radical German cinema stars in his own 1975 feature as a working-class gay boy who wants love, craves acceptance and happens to have won the lottery — the cue for his merciless exploitation by more savvy acquaintances. As well as being a trenchant case for class consciousness, it's a bruising reminder that people can share your sexuality without giving a shit about your welfare. Barely half an hour long, it unfolds without words in two of Genet's regular registers, incarcerated and bucolic, as it explores the love of two separated inmates and the jealousy of their guard. It features set-piece sequences of erotic dancing and masturbation, but neither is as hot as one captive blowing smoke through the wall into the other's cell. The US Supreme Court declared it obscene. BW Director: Andrew Haigh Cast: Chris New, Tom Cullen On director Andrew Haigh's' breakthrough film he paints an intimiate portrait of what it's like to be gay in modern Britain. We meet two men from Nottingham, Russell Tom Cullen and Glen Chris New , meet, a casual hookup starts to take on new meaning. The film is perfectly observed, from the nuances of cruising the dancefloor at the end of the night to the painstaking deliberations over how to punctuate a post-hookup text. Across a 48-hour timeframe, and aided by performances by Cullen and New, these build up to create an unnerving but wholly effective naturalistic cinematic experience. The emotion quietly grows, as does your empathy for the characters, and you become aware of how a profound, possibly unrepeatable connection can be built from such average beginnings. Where transvestism had previously been played for absurdity in the cinema, this filthy-gorgeous comedy instead played up its lavish beauty. The sight of a drag queen atop a pink commuter bus, miles of glittering tinfoil fabric billowing into the desert behind her, was enough to make even the most obstinately tweedy dresser jealous of her boogie. Fuelled by his jet-propelled performance and sensational songs co-written with Stephen Trask, it's a bittersweet ode to the survival of the freakiest. Born in East Germany but marooned in the American heartland, Hedwig has been doubly shortchanged — first by a botched sex change, then by her ex achieving stardom with music they made together. Hilarious, poignant and often quite spiky, the film, like its subject, is a one-off. BW Director: Stephen Frears Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Gordon Warnecke Sexuality is only one element in a storm of conflicting values and behaviours in Hanif Kureishi's screenplay about Omar Gordon Warnecke , a young British-Pakistani man caught between the entrepreneurial, Thatcherite dreams of his uncle Saeed Jaffrey and the more romantic, intellectual ambitions of his alcoholic father Roshan Seth. Omar's unlikely attraction to Johnny Daniel Day-Lewis , an old friend turned neo-fascist hooligan, results in a sex scene in the back of Omar's refurbished laundrette that makes literal the idea of everything coming out in the wash. DC Director: Sally Potter Cast: Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, Quentin Crisp Sally Potter's 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel is remarkable for its casting alone. Tilda Swinton as an immortal, gender-swapping aristo who looks equally good in doublet and hose or on a motorbike? Octogenarian Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I? Billy Zane as our hero's bit on the side? Plus some special musical contributions from Jimmy Somerville. BW Director: Hettie MacDonald Cast: Glen Berry, Scott Neal, Tameka Empson This is the film of British writer Jonathan Harvey's 1993 play, a tender story of emerging sexuality and friendships between outsiders on a south London council estate. Sweetly it shows the tentative coming together of two white, working-class schoolboys, Jamie Glen Berry and Ste Scott Neal , whose wide-eyed romance, when it happens, turns out to be less complicated than the lives of some of the characters around them. Those characters include their eccentric teenage neighbour Leah Tameka Empson , who is obsessed with Mama Cass and plays her records loudly in the middle of the night. A soft-hearted urban fantasy. Director Luca Guadagnino captures the confusion, simmering lust and crackling tension between precocious and thoughtful 17-year-old Elio Chalamet and the allure of the older, magnetic and dashingly handsome Oliver Hammer. AK Director: Alain Berliner Cast: Georges Du Fresne, Michèle Laroque, Jean-Philippe Écoffey Little Ludovic's parents think their young child is a boy with a worrying thing for Barbie-style dolls. But Ludovic isn't worried. She just feels she's a girl. Childhood trans identity remains a controversial subject and Belgian director Alain Berliner's 1997 work was a bold early attempt to put it at the heart of a film. It stands up well, too. Georges Du Fresne gives a beautiful central performance as Ludovic, the irreverent humour is a joy and this is a solidly empathetic portrayal of a child pursuing happiness in a world that fears difference. An illustration of that: this sweet, gentle story was rated R in America. Beryl Reid wolfs down the scenery as June, an actor known and loved as sweet Sister George in a TV soap but in real life a boozed-up monster given to molesting nuns in taxi cabs. Her behaviour threatens both her work and her relationship with pliable Childie Susannah York , yet Reid maintains our sympathy. The film includes scenes shot at real-life legendary London lesbian club the Gateways. But this rich, ripe, wrenching Oscar winner from 1999 may represent his most generous Valentine to the community. River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves play a pair of rent-boy drifters on the streets of Seattle — and still the tweenies swooned and put their posters up on the walls. TH Director: Wong Kar-wai Cast: Leslie Cheung, Tony Cheung Love hurts in Wong Kar-wai's characteristically swoonworthy account of the codependent tango between impulsive Ho Leslie Cheung and down-to-earth Lai Tony Cheung , a Hong Kong couple adrift on the other side of the world. Having decamped to Argentina, the pair prove incapable of nourishing one other yet equally incapable of ending the relationship that defines them. Powerful performances are supported by Wong's elliptical structure and the superb work of regular collaborators like cinematographer Christopher Doyle and production designer William Chang. Made in 1997, it's a metaphor for Hong Kong's handover to China and an unforgettably poignant bad romance. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal star in the tragedy-bound love story as strapping sheep-herders in 1960s Wyoming. And to this day, no one can look at a flannel shirt on a hanger without getting misty-eyed.
