Directed by D. A. Pennebaker • 1970 • United States
Starring Stephen Sondheim, Elaine Stritch, Donna McKechnie

This legendary, long-unavailable documentary from Direct Cinema pioneer D. A. Pennebaker captures the behind-the-scenes drama that went into the making of a classic Broadway recording. ...

Directed by Donna Deitch • 1985 • United States

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...

Directed by Jennie Livingston • 1990 • United States
Starring Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African America...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • France
Starring Chantal Akerman, Niels Arestrup, Claire Wauthion

Chantal Akerman’s first narrative feature is a startlingly vulnerable exploration of alienation and the search for connection. In a performance at once daringly exposed and enigmatic, Akerman pl...

Directed by Howard Brookner • 1983 • United States

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 Brook...

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1972 • West Germany
Starring Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Katrin Schaake

In the early 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the American melodramas of Douglas Sirk and was inspired by them to begin working in a new, more intensely emotional regi...

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1982 • Germany
Starring Brad Davis, Franco Nero, Jeanne Moreau

Conjured from the unholy meeting of two iconoclastic queer artists, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film audaciously raises Jean Genet’s controversial novel to the level of myth. In an expressi...

Directed by John Cameron Mitchell • 2001 • United States
Starring John Cameron Mitchell, Andrea Martin, Michael Pitt

With this trailblazing musical, writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell and composer-lyricist Stephen Trask brought their signature creation from stage to screen for a movie...

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1975 • West Germany
Starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Peter Chatel, Carl Boehm

A lottery win leads not to financial and emotional freedom but to social captivity, in this wildly cynical classic about love and exploitation by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Casti...

Directed by Wong Kar Wai • 1997 • Hong Kong
Starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing

One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar Wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Leslie Cheun...

Directed by Andrew Haigh • 2011 • United Kingdom
Starring Tom Cullen, Chris New

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 discussi...

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 Gus Van Sant • 1985 • United States
Starring Tim Streeter, Doug Cooeyate, Ray Monge

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 ...

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 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 me...

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...

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 Patricia Rozema • 1987 • Canada
Starring Sheila McCarthy, Paule Baillargeon, Ann-Marie MacDonald

Structured around a video-recorded confession, this charming, whimsical story about a waifish daydreamer with artistic aspirations won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1987 Cannes Film Fest...

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...

Directed by Jennifer Reeder • 2015 • Canada
Starring Kelsey Ashby-Middleton, Morgan S. Reesh, Marissa Castillo

Countdown to prom night is actually countdown to irreversible change for three girls. While two of them fall in love with each other against all expectations, the third is forced to mot...

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 ...

Directed by Ira Sachs • 1996 • United States
Starring Shayne Gray, Thang Chan, Rachel Zan Huss

The doomed romance between Lincoln (Shayne Gray), an affluent white teenager, and Minh (Thang Chan), the immigrant son of a poor Vietnamese woman and a Black GI, moodily evokes the wide space between d...

Directed by Shikeith • 2014 • United States

This experimental documentary mines the psycho-emotional landscape of Black masculinity. Shot in striking black and white, #BLACKMENDREAM features nine men from diverse backgrounds who, with their backs turned to the camera, discuss the obstacles—incl...

Directed by Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore • 1981 • United Kingdom
Starring Gilbert Prousch, George Passmore

See the world through the beautiful, humorous, shocking, and absurd lens of British “living sculpture” provocateurs Gilbert & George, a couple in life and art-making whose defiantly ...