The 30 Best LGBTQ+ Films of All Time (2024)

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“The Festival has long supported my work, from Poison and Dottie Gets Spanked in the early 1990s through to Carol which is screening on 35mm later this week in BFI Flare’s Best of Year programme. I’m so proud to have Carol voted as the top LGBTQ+ film of all time in this poll launched for the Fest’s 30th edition. Carol is in illustrious company with so many films I love, from Brokeback Mountain and Un Chant d’ Amour to Happy Together and My Own PrivateIdaho.”

“The BFI Flare team are delighted with the results. Here are 30 films we love and so many we have screened in the Festival. Carol’s win excites us because it’s great to see a film about two women in love enjoy such prominence, particularly given cinema’s relative lack of lesbian content, and it’s such an extraordinarily fine film which has had near universal praise from critics and curators. To see Carol enshrined in this way so soon after release is a testament to how beloved it is and how esteemed Todd Haynes is as a filmmaker. We also love to see British cinema so heavily celebrated, from Andrew Haigh’s Weekend at number 2 to My Beautiful Laundrette, Orlando, Looking for Langston, Victim and Beautiful Things, all making the Top20.”

Literally the lesbian film everyone has been waiting for. Translated to the screen, Carol is everything I loved about the book and then a million times more. It is spectacular, breathtaking cinema. I fell in love with it at firstsight.

—EmmaSmart

Beautiful, moving, with fine performances from Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett. Clearly, but sadly not surprisingly, under-recognised through the awards season, indicating there’s a still a way to go for LGBTQ+ films in themainstream.

—RhidianDavis

For those who feel Todd Haynes is our greatest director it was either going to be this or Far from Heaven, but this just has the edge on the strength of its screenplay (beautifully adapting a book I’ve loved deeply for 20 years) and its entirely perfect finalshot.

—BrionyHanson

What I love about Carol is the way we’re held outside the central relationship. How audacious. How challenging. We are left to our own voyeurism, the seduction of the image.Genius.

—SarahWood

Perfect book. Perfect film. Todd Haynes. Todd Haynes. ToddHaynes.

—TriciaTuttle

Watch Carol on BFI Player

Real people. Real situations. No gay ‘issues’. A wonderful antidote to the clichés of LGBTQ+ cinema. This is the very best kind of relationship drama – gay orotherwise.

—RobinBaker

Something miraculous: a touching brief encounter between men which manages to avoid imposing straight models and respects the specificity of gayordinariness.

—RichardDyer

Watch Weekend on BFI Player

I’d seen a lot of amazing LGBTQ+ films before I saw Happy Together, but none that had made being gay look so cool. The last shot, set to a deliriously happy cover version of the title song, isunforgettable.

—AlexDavidson

This film is not simply a crystallisation of excellent directing, cinematography, and acting, but also a testimony of the political effect of Hong Kong during the time of its handover from Great Britain to China, mapped onto the painful codependent relationship between the twocharacters.

—VictorFan

When I first saw this at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, I was upset for about a week. Simple thoughts about it would bring me to tears. Profoundly sad, with beautiful, complex, sympathetic performances across theboard.

—BenRoberts

It was groundbreaking to see a mainstream film with big name stars approach a gay romance in such an authentic, sensitive manner, and Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are both exceptional. Michelle Williams is also superb as the wife left reeling after the discovery of her husband’s truesexuality.

—NikkiBaughan

If the number of tears that I shed while watching this are any measure of its greatness, well, this is a bona fidemasterpiece.

—RobinBaker

What really is not to love about this epic gay ballroomfilm?

—BisiAlimi

Glamour, music, bitches and tragedy; and it’s all real. A special film with a legendary pedigree in class of its own. Like a limited edition Gaultier Bra. A story that says more about life and living life to the full than a thousand hollow promises the heterosexual world couldoffer.

—TopherCampbell

Utterly bizarre. Utterly beautiful. The weirdest and most wonderful gay love story ever told. The final encounter between the hero, searching for his lost lover, and the tiger, is completelyhypnotic.

—AlexDavidson

hom*osexuality, racism and Thatcherism – a potent mix deftly handled in Frears’ evocative and boldcomedy-drama.

—NeilMitchell

One of the best films about the Thatcher era – what it meant, how it shaped contemporary life and how its values might be challenged orreworked.

—MariaDelgado

Buy My Beautiful Laundrette on BFI dual format edition (Blu-ray/DVD)

My favourite of Almodóvar’s films, and one of the most sensitive works about transsexual and transgender living evermade.

—JulietJacques

The ultimate Almodóvar film, fusing a narrative situation that could have come straight out of a Douglas Sirk melodrama with far more turn-of-the-millennium concerns about transvestism, transsexualism, AIDS, prostitution and out-of-the-bluebereavement.

—MichaelBrooke

Watch All About My Mother on BFI Player

Jean Genet’s unbelievably sexy film, set in a prison, has one of the all-time top hom*oerotic moments in cinema when the two inmates share a cigarette through a small hole by blowing the smoke into the mouth of the other. A stunning exploration of sex, power &violence.

—SelinaRobertson

Extraordinary and verybeautiful.

—Catharine DesForges

Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix give bravura performances as two gay street hustlers in Van Sant’s blistering early 90s exploration of the unforgiving American gayscene.

—NikkiBaughan

Cinematicpoetry.

—NeilMcGlone

A breath of fresh air and one that weirdly served to remind me of some of the best of ‘old’ queer cinema, following a working girl on a mission to find her man. LA never looked lovelier; I never smiled sowide.

—BrionyHanson

Tangerine is full of drama, donuts and pathos but is also the best LA Christmas film since DieHard.

—BenLuxford

I could easily have included several Fassbinder films in this list (sorry Fox and Elvira), but I’ll allow myself only one. Everything you need to know about the cruelty of love in two hours. So savage. Soperfect.

—MichaelBlyth

As with many of my favourite gay films, the specifics of sexuality are never an issue in Petra von Kant, leaving room for a universal exploration of how capricious love canbe.

—PeterStrickland

Watch The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant on BFI Player

Although problematic in its apparent male gaze and unrealistic gay lovemaking, this features performances by Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos that are charged with snap-crackling chemistry. The tender eroticism actually lies more in the subtle acts of the mundane – Adèle’s eating ravenously, or simply strolling across theroad.

—CorrinaAntrobus

One of the great films about love, and the destructive aftermath of itsfailure.

—JonSpira

Watch Blue is the Warmest Colour on BFI Player

What would queer cinema look like now if the Nazis hadn’t stopped its first nascent flowering? This film is spot on about the intoxicating love that teenage girls feel, but I also admire how it handles Fräulein von Bernburg’s love for Manuela too. She is not immune to Manuela’s affections and has a hard time managing her ownfeelings.

—TriciaTuttle

Revolutionary spirit borne of intense erotic lesbian attachment and femalesolidarity.

—RichardDyer

Buy Mädchen in Uniform on BFI dual format edition (Blu-ray/DVD)

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Beautiful Thing has peppermint foot lotion. Show Me Love has chocolate milk. Moodysson’s debut is a truly sublime and touching story of star-crossed teen-girl lovers, a relationship clearly destined to go nowhere together but oblivious in their delight at discovering eachother.

—NyreeJillings

I remember this having a profound effect on me when I first saw it. The queering of gender seemed an impossible dream at the time, only something in movies! I’ve come back to it time and time again since and each time found something new thatresonates.

—JasonBarker

Dirk Bogarde’s extremely brave performance as a closeted barrister drawn into a gay blackmail case directly influenced public opinion, and played a part in changing the law in Britain when the Sexual Offences Act was finally passed in1967.

—SimonMcCallum

Watch Victim on BFI Player

Every frame is breathtakingly beautiful. Possibly the earliest lesbian sex scene incinema.

—NazmiaJamal

Quite simply the best film touching on human sexual life of any kind. Not only did Chantal Akerman conceive and direct this radical and eloquent work, she commandingly, exquisitely occupies every single moment of the film’s 90minutes.

—AdamRoberts

The original and best. A film that fuses art cinema with historical narrative. Langston revels in its underground credentials while also reminding us that Black is Beautiful. A witness to how we were once outlaws and warriors ofdesire.

—TopherCampbell

Military men with muscles in the desert would, in real life, be my idea of hell (honest), but Denis’ phenomenal image-making and her absorption of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd achieve a magnificence all herown.

—NickJames

Adorable and tender love story portraying a rare optimism about gay relationships which was long-awaited, and something of agame-changer.

—RhidianDavis

Watch Beautiful Thing on BFI Player

Stranger by the Lake isn’t a film that you watch, it’s a place that you go to. A sexy parallel universe populated by naked male bodies and ruled by erotic abandon. Whilst its limits are tested, and its dangers are exposed, it is never judged. Rather, it is a meticulously crafted yet surprisingly tender exploration of queer desire, love, affection andcommunity.

—DavidEdgar

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Queerness as a crowbar, to force open the cracks in polite society. Funny,too.

—MarkCousins

Like an ancestor of Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin (with more omnivorous tastes), Terence Stamp’s stranger arrives as if from – or actually from? – outer space to seduce every member of an Italian family. Intoxicatingly strange, this is Pasolini at his most visionary, Stamp at his mostmagnetic.

—SamWigley

Buy Theorem on BFI dual format edition (Blu-ray/DVD)

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“Girlfriend got it goin’ on!” Cheryl’s appraisal of 1930s African American performer Fae ‘The Watermelon Woman’ Richards applies equally to the film and its director. Dunye played Dunye, and Richards was her note-perfect invention. “Sometimes you have to create your own history” ends the film: The Watermelon Woman madehistory.

—SophieMayer

Watch The Watermelon Woman on BFI Player

If ever there was a queer film that tells it like it is when it comes to finding out our ways to be real; this is it. Simple distilled emotion gets full on treatment in this taught family drama. It shows how much we all want to befree.

—TopherCampbell

Riffing on identity-merge classics Vertigo and Persona, David Lynch recasts the eponymous highway as a Möbius strip in which Camilla/Rita/Laura Harring is probably always crashing in the same car, always grappling through her confusion to the care of ingénue Betty/Diane/Naomi Watts, before their lives do a switcheroo after a heady night at the ClubSilencio.

—SamWigley

Fraught, tense, wonderful. Jason Holliday vs Shirley Clarke one night in the ChelseaHotel.

—JayBernard

Brilliant on so many levels and one of the high points of US cinema’s greatest era. Pacino’s confessional phone call with Chris Sarandon is one of the great pieces of screenacting.

—LeighSinger

Visconti may have melted Dirk Bogarde’s face with toxic theatrical make-up, but this is the most beautiful film about love and death evermade.

—SarahWood

A joyously sexy, almost psychedelic collection of stories featuring the fabulous beauty of Bobby Kendall in this hugely influential self-produced film by James Bidgood. A miracle of low-budget filmmaking andartistry.

—BrianRobinson

Watch Pink Narcissus on BFI Player

With intelligence, sensitivity and honesty, Sunday, Bloody Sunday explores an emotional, bisexual triangle, involving three people in a painful search for love and happiness. Peter Finch’s tour-de-force as the middle-aged gay doctor isunforgettable.

—StephenBourne

Buy Sunday Bloody Sunday on BFI Blu-ray

Beautifully understated and ambiguous, this quiet, gentle film about a 10-year-old grappling with uncertainties of gender identity is pitch-perfect and deeplyaffecting.

—CarmenGray

Watch Tomboy on BFI Player

Toshio Matsumoto’s psychedelic trans-Oedipal bloodbath is entirely insane, in the best possibleway.

—SamAshby

Buy Funeral Parade of Roses on BFI Blu-ray

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