What are your top 10 gay movies for Pride month?
 

Mine are:

1. Personal Best = starring Mariel Hemingway
2. The Hours = starring Meryl Streep
3. It’s My Party = starring Eric Roberts
4 Brokeback Mountain = starring Heath Ledger
5. Carrington = starring Emma Thompson
6. Sordid Lives = starring Delta Burke
7. Call Me By Your Name = starring Armie Hammer
8. And the Band Played On (tv movie) = starring Matthew Modine
9. The Children’s Hour = starring Audrey Hepburn
10. Far From Heaven = starring Julianne Moore

Honorable Mentions: The Talented Mr. Ripley, Carol, Moonlight, Philadelphia, Boys Don’t Cry...

I don't have a top 10 and they're not exclusively gay, but some movies I'm fond of and that deal with sexuality and gender identity in some form are:

Transamerica
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Diverso da chi? aka Different from Whom?
American beauty
In & Out
Philadelphia
Wilde
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Monster
The Color Purple
Mulholland Drive
Le fate ignoranti aka His Secret Life
Victor Victoria
The Crying Game

I almost put The Color Purple but I thought there wasn’t enough lesbianism in it to justify it. In and Out was hilarious. Victor Victoria was really too.

How has no one mentioned The Birdcage with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane? :laugh::laugh::laugh:

In honor of #Stonewall50, it’s time to protest the insidious, police-state-like hegemony of both contemporary Hollywood (hype) and Vito Russo/The Celluloid Closet (pseudo-academia) with a personal chronology:

PRIDE '19: THE 19 GREATEST GAY FILMS OF ALL TIME
A CHRONOLOGY
(One per filmmaker)

MICHAEL (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924) – An older man and master artist's desire for the ideal of masculine beauty inspires art born of sacrifice, which is to say, of Love, in the midst of a definitively rendered art-world demimonde teeming with heterosexual infidelity (A Master spiritual filmmaker goes beyond his era’s fashionable politics—and ours)

THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) – Three outsiders in the South, two queer white kids and a Black housekeeper, bear the social burdens of individuality and responsibility, together and—then apart (Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, and Brandon De Wilde create definitive American gay Myths, bringing Carson McCullers to life)

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) – Tennessee Williams definitively reveals the exploitative decadence—"Tired of the dark ones, famished for the blond ones"—of Wildean gay culture through the unraveling of a repressed memory/mystery of a gay aesthete's bizarre death (As seen through a glass sympathetically by Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift)

THE GRIM REAPER (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962) – A Rashomon of cruising that charts the connection between sex, commerce, and illicit subculture through the interrogation flashbacks of various hetero-male characters' private agons orbiting the murder of a female prostitute, culminating in the film’s slumming gay John alone rising above shame to civic duty and compassionate action (Bertolucci’s debut gives poetic, sensual—cinematic—heft to Pasolini’s devastating insights)

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (John Huston, 1967) – Things heat up on a military base when Marlon Brando represses his desire for "bare-backed and bare-assed" horse-riding Robert Forster by romanticizing the orderly military “life of men among men,” leading inexorably to domestic disaster with wife Elizabeth Taylor (With the second adaptation of McCullers on the list, auteur John Huston, as always, makes movies for grown-ups)

STAIRCASE (Stanley Donen, 1969) – Still Hollywood’s greatest gay film, its expressive mise-en-scene conveys the universal experience of the domestic impact of aging male ego—a gay "marriage" providing the opportunity to explore the full range of this theme doubly poignantly: from hair tonics to sexual indiscretion (As the middle-aged couple, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison give their best-ever performances)

COME BACK TO THE 5 & DIME JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN (Robert Altman, 1982) – A torch singer cometh to expose essential—spiritual—deceptions, thus rendering the ache embedded in human sexuality through the reproductive yearning of a spectral victim of a gay-bashing and gang rape named Joe (*sigh* Mark Patton) and the mysteriously connected regret and resignation of the richest transgender characterization in movie history (Altman’s Jimmy Dean and his army-barracks follow-up Streamers (1983) remain the peak achievements in American gay cinema; Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, and Cher in their best-ever performances)

QUERELLE (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982) – "We have Jesus to thank that we are able to glorify humility;" the philosophical implications of gay desire and gay sex manifest themselves cinematically: Expressionist phallic soundstage, Surrealist desire-driven narrative, Brechtian liberation of film codes, and the tactile sense of the male physique (Brad Davies! Sailors!) (Adapting Genet, Fassbinder's final film distilled his didactic oeuvre to its Un chant d'amour essence—and then transcended it)

THE COLOR PURPLE (Steven Spielberg, 1985) - By tapping into the full capabilities of the Hollywood apparatus—in terms of both technological grandeur (the Lean-like Letters sequence that introduced Semiotics to big-budget spectacle) and cathartic affect (recreating the separation scene from Griffith's Orphans of the Storm)—to bring the audience into the imaginative world of its Jim Crowe-era protagonist, Spielberg (sigh) created the Gone With the Wind of Lesbian and Black representation (Proof: Everyone loves this movie, everyone knows it, and there isn't a Tyler Perry play that doesn't quote it)

THE LONG DAY CLOSES (Terence Davies, 1993) – Family (absent father), cultural (English, Catholic), and Pop-cultural (movie, music) heritage provides expansive material mined by Davies for breathtaking visual and sonic epiphanies that express an autobiographical gay boy's experience of loneliness, and consequent unexpressed feeling, pangs of attraction and shame, and warm respite in kinship and at the movies (Simply put: THE GREATEST GAY FILM OF ALL TIME—OFFICIALLY!)

WILD REEDS (Andre Techine, 1995) – The greatest coming-of-age film of all time captures the heightened sensation of maturing out of adolescence into sexual and political awakening (beyond binaries to discover shared humanity) and moral and social challenge—literally misting up as I think of the ending, a heartbreaking cry to a friend that signals a non-diegetic pop-music queue, two sounds everyone will recognize (Techine is the second greatest living filmmaker, whose Being 17 (2016), The Witnesses (2008), and I Don't Kiss (1991), to name just three gay-cinema peaks, would easily have sat high on this list)

HAPPY TOGETHER (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997) – The still-definitive break-up, make-up, break-up gay movie ingeniously expresses its Chinese lovers' romantic disturbance in relief to their spatial dislocation in the urban and natural settings on a trip to Argentina so that form follows feeling—dazzling transitions in film-stock and -speed achieves phenomenological awe and pop catharsis (With China's leading auteur teaming with the country's two greatest male stars, it's the nearest reach for the Sternberg-Dietrich ring of film Romanticism yet in gay movies)

THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN (Patrice Chereau, 1999) – The primal appeal of The Big Chill given operatic, cinematic largesse through unencumbered Cinemascope as art-hounds-on-the-brink descend upon Limoges for their maestro's funeral, where hetero-couplings get tested, transgender identity confounds then conveys universal longings, and the proposal to live life imaginatively in the age of AIDS for a gay-male love triangle—each actor like marble chiseled by light—climaxes in one of the top 5 most awesome movie endings—an angel's eye view that breaks boundaries and defeats death (R.I.P. Patrice Chereau, whose Those Love Me Can Take the Train (1999), Son frere (2004), and Queen Margot (1994) are the most "me" of movies)

THREE DANCING SLAVES (Gael Morel, 2005) – Raising the codes of gay porn to the level of high art gives liberating erotic force to the film's homosocial exploration of three brothers traversing masculine expectations in dynamics of fraternity, family, capitalism, and, most radically, gay intimacy, which extends to compassion and, finally through heartbreak, to imaginative engagement (Since I've been resorting to superlatives, here's another: Fulfilling Pauline Kael's porno-art dream, this is the hottest movie of all time, or at least since A Place in the Sun.)

RAGING SUN, RAGING SKY (Julian Hernandez, 2009) – In this "Mythologies" of gay cruising, three characters achingly yearn for connection but when two find each other and another is left heartbroken, the quest transforms into a literal pagan Mexican Creation myth that hinges on the gay lovers' extension of their relationship into radical compassion—answering the challenge to gay love's gratuitous potential; call it: "The Metaphysics of the Third Wheel" (Mexico's Julian Hernandez is the only master filmmaker to emerge in the 21st Century, so seek out the first two films in the trilogy this film completes: A Thousand Clouds of Peace (2004) and Broken Sky (2006), as well as I Am Happiness on Earth (2014) and the short film collection Mexican Men (2016))

YOSSI (Eytan Fox, 2013) – Through a queered social perspective that achieves both unabashed gay romanticism (masculine delicacy, spiritual renewal) and penetrating cultural insight (divining spiritual turmoil in political reality), the state of Yossi (grieving his lost love, a fellow soldier) reflects the theological quandary of the State of Israel, seeking a home, seeking the Other (When Yossi (Ohad Knoller) exposes his vulnerability to a gorgeous soldier, the embrace that ensues achieves the power of parable)

4 MOONS (Sergio Tovar Velarde, 2014) – Four crosscut narratives, recalling Griffith and Altman, focus on different stages in gay-male development to unveil one surprising emotional-cultural truth-insight after another through juxtaposition, synchronicity, and morally evocative overlap while each sequence evinces amazingly feelingful staging, lighting and directing of actors—such as that in which mother and son watch/talk about a telenovela with ravishing intensity (It's a new masterpiece—and a new Christmas classic; Also: Is Hugo Catalán the most beautiful man in movies today?)

PARIS 05:59: THEO & HUGO (Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, 2017) – With the intensity achieved by a fleet 97-minutes set in real-time, movement in Cinemascope space thrusts its lovers into the social world and, most profoundly, into the future beyond the dread and longing inherent in modern mating rituals (anonymous sex, intimacy, AIDS scare/treatment). (Inspired (as always) by the musicals of Jacques Demy, the filmmakers combine gay sex-club grit and movie-musical stylization to quote and redeem the unforgettable utopian kitsch of West Side Story to make time stand still during the film's audacious 18-minute opening orgy.)

LUDWIG (Luchino Visconti, 1973/2018) – The gay epic of one’s dreams: Imagine the true story of a queer King with the means to build palaces that reflect his personal sense of life and his country’s Romanticism (Wagner-inspired); in other words, it’s an existential triumph and a political tragedy (Last year’s Pride season heralded the US release of the full director’s cut in theaters—it should have changed (but didn't) gay culture and movie history forever, deflating each Pride float's gay capitulation to consumerism; in other words, it’s an existential-political catastrophe)

My Beautiful Laundrette.

Best, BEST movie ever.

In US you may not have seen it but it was HUGE in Europe. I recommend checking it out!

You beat me to it. Great film.

I'd also add: Wilde, My Own Private Idaho and, of course, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

One of my faves - 'Maurice' (1987). Such a beautiful film. :nod:

I don’t consider the Color Purple a gay film. Also, Suddenly Last Summer - really? The man was a child molester, who used his girlfriend to attrack boys. Also, Come Back to the Five and Dime is about a transgender person, not the same thing. You can also tell that this movie was a play first. Dont get me wrong I like the movie but never considered it gay. I guess I see gay and transgender as separate. Kathy Bates was my favorite character.

#TheNineWorthies - The 9 Best Gay Films of the 2010s
1. Being 17 (Andre Techine, 2016)
2. 4 Moons (Sergio Tovar Velarde, 2014)
3. I Am Happiness on Earth (Julian Hernandez, 2014)
4. Paris 05:59: Theo & Hugo (Olivier Ducastel/Jacques Martineau, 2017)
5. Catch the Wind (Gael Morel, 2018)
6. Yossi (Eytan Fox, 2013)
7. Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodovar, 2019)
8. 4 Days in France (Jérôme Reybaud, 2017)
9. Salvation Army (Abdellah Taia, 2014)

I’m a fan of Alan Brown’s Private Romeo (2011). The cast of stage-trained young actors does superb work—they carry the narrative burden, the poetry burden, and the emotional burden like old pros. The result isn’t stuffy or amateurish or in any way miscalculated; it’s euphoric. Despite its being set in a military academy during the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era, politics is blessedly kept to a minimum in favor of accessible and ultimately memorable storytelling. I highly, highly recommend.

I’m not crazy about a lot of the movies with gay texts or subtexts that draw everyone’s attention, like Visconti’s Death in Venice, the Jean Genet movie A Song of Love, Tea and Sympathy, King Ludwig (the Ken Russell nonsense, whatever its actual title is), Jarman’s Tempest and Caravaggio, Prospero’s Books, and the prestige stuff like Victoria/Victoria (most of which toys timidly with its themes). There’s a John Butler movie called Handsome Devil, filmed in Ireland and featuring a great rock soundtrack—the movie is pretty good but just doesn’t really dig in. It’s like Chariots of Fire or Rocky at the end, with a heaving sense of uplift to send everyone out of the theater skipping.

Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising is comically first-rate. I forgot about that one.

Def will check out Romeo—it helps to acknowledge Shakespeare. Thanks for the tip!

Love the Visconti Death in Venice!

I admire Jarman, especially his recently released lost film, but he doesn’t fulfill the ideal of gay cinema I express above—I seek the Griffith impulse, extending the expressive means of medium but as a bid to popular appeal. Hence Genet’s experimentation is fulfilled in Fassbinder’s accessible sensual Fantasia with Querrelle. Both artists transcended.

I have had this disagreement with friends but Tea & Sympathy is about a heterosexual boy whose art is insufficiently empathetic—as expressed in the Minnelli ending as pure cinema. It’s a great film. Just not a gay one.

The language and enthusiasm is, indeed, euphoric. The filmmaking, less so. Still, the staging is often inspired. The Prince breaking the CD is an example. Also, there is needed wish-fulfillment, not just in the happy ending, but the reconciliation of Mercutio and Tybalt is a dream of masculine sensitivity come true centuries in the hoping.

DEATH IN VENICE (Luchino Visconti, 1971)
What makes a “gay film” anyway? The career of Luchino Visconti complicates all of the connotations of that phrase, which suggests today’s gay ghetto distribution-exhibition model. He always connects desire and society, history and commerce with a luxurious—gay—attentiveness to masculine beauty and feminine mystery even in in the hetero milieus of his masterpieces (La Terra Trema, Bellissima, Senso, White Nights, and Rocco and His Brothers). These qualities combine with a cruel sense of fate to negotiate Visconti’s Marxist dialecticism and aristocratic nostalgia—which meet to angle his unorthodox approach to gay portraiture and queer sociology in his later work (The Damned, Conversation Piece, and Ludwig). Visconti's most overt contribution to gay cinema is his adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. With it, Visconti changes the medium (novella to film) and that of its artist-protagonist (author to composer). Doing so, he reconciles—and transcends—the aesthetic-philosophical debate (Apollo vs. Dionysus) articulated in the dialogue and plotting through the musicality of imagery (reinvigorating period films along with 70s landmarks McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Barry Lyndon, and The Story of Adele H.). A master at portraying sexual repression, Dirk Bogarde plays composer Gustav who calls for purity in art—a grieving father’s plaint—and mastery of the flesh. Gustav embarks to Venice from Germany to recover from a blow to his health and to his art philosophy. In cholera-ridden Venice, blond-haired blue-eyed waif Tadzio (Björn Andresen) fulfills Gustav’s aesthetics but rocks his philosophy by giving flesh to an ideal. He extends Plato's cave to the Christian revelation of the West's art heritage. Hence, I think the ending is misunderstood. Visconti affords equal beauty and grandeur to Gustav’s pathetic sacrifice—scored to Mahler—as his sublime last look at Tadzio, an unconsummated openness to passion realized in Gustav’s final stunted gesture. Through this film’s visualization of gay rapture—Gustav watching Tadzio wrestling on the beach—Visconti redeems the contingency of flesh. That is what makes a “gay film” a great film.

Not in order:

1. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
2. Law of Desire (spanish movie, directed by Pedro Almodovar, starring a young Antonio Banderas)
3. And the Band Played On
4. Call Me By Your Name
5. The Crying Game
6. The Birdcage (though I've heard the original french version is far better, but I've not seen that).
7. The Bad Education (Almodovar's spanish movie with Gael Garcia Bernal)
8. Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss
9. Strawberry and Chocolate (an international-cuban movie about two friends; one gay and fierce communist, the other straight and fierce individualist; and how they come to love each other, in some way.)
10. Contracorriente (Undertow, peruvian movie. A "ghost" story about a married fisherman who struggles to reconcile his devotion to his male lover within the rigid traditions of his small town. The romance continues beyond life)

The Crying Game actually breaks my heart :distress:

Here's a few movies within the genre that I truly loved:

Blue Is The Warmest Colour (2013)
Moonlight (2016)
A Single Man (2009)
Call Me By Your Name (2017)

I did mention The Birdcage when I discovered this thread. The greek dishes and the "I could have dance all night" are both my favorite scenes, couldn't laugh more!

I wondered how has no one mentioned Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss. It's a very cool movie. My favorite quote there is when Gabriel tells Billy I don't know i figured you just listen stuff like Pet Shop Boys or Erasure. Typical preconception :rolleyes:

I will update my list to a top 20 for 2020 and rewrite my Color Purple summary.

Can anyone guess what will take the #20 spot?

Does anyone care?

I'll probably forget some, but here goes
1. Torch Song Trilogy
2. The Times of Harvey Milk
3. The Celluloid Closet
4. Call Me By Your Name
5. Love, Simon
6. The Children's Hour
7. Cruising
8. And The Band Plays On
9. Making Love
10. God's Own Country

Honorable Mentions
Maurice
Longtime Companion
The Normal Heart
Free Fall
Looking
Tom Of Finland
and recently saw Reel In The Closet and really enjoyed it

Updated to add a 20th film (Savage Nights - yay!), to re-write my capsule review of The Color Purple (why is it on this list? here's why), and to clarify the inclusion of Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean which is definitely a gay film.

2020: As the world roils in simultaneous isolation and mass protest, Pride 2020 offers the opportunity to revisit our shared cultural (cinematic) heritage to restore radical empathy and artistic activism through this personal chronology:

PRIDE '20: THE 20 GREATEST GAY FILMS OF ALL TIME
A CHRONOLOGY
(One per filmmaker)
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/johnd...s-of-all-time/

MICHAEL (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924) – An older man and master artist's desire for the ideal of masculine beauty inspires art born of sacrifice, which is to say, of Love, in the midst of a definitively rendered art-world demimonde teeming with heterosexual infidelity (A Master spiritual filmmaker goes beyond his era’s fashionable politics—and ours)

THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) – Three outsiders in the South, two queer white kids and a Black housekeeper, bear the social burdens of individuality and responsibility, together and—then apart (Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, and Brandon De Wilde create definitive American gay Myths, bringing Carson McCullers to life)

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) – Tennessee Williams definitively reveals the exploitative decadence—"Tired of the dark ones, famished for the blond ones"—of Wildean gay culture through the unraveling of a repressed memory/mystery of a gay aesthete's bizarre death (As seen through a glass sympathetically by Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift)

THE GRIM REAPER (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962) – A Rashomon of cruising that charts the connection between sex, commerce, and illicit subculture through the interrogation flashbacks of various hetero-male characters' private agons orbiting the murder of a female prostitute, culminating in the film’s slumming gay John alone rising above shame to civic duty and compassionate action (Bertolucci’s debut gives poetic, sensual—cinematic—heft to Pasolini’s devastating insights)

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (John Huston, 1967) – Things heat up on a military base when Marlon Brando represses his desire for "bare-backed and bare-assed" horse-riding Robert Forster by romanticizing the orderly military “life of men among men,” leading inexorably to domestic disaster with wife Elizabeth Taylor (With the second adaptation of McCullers on the list, auteur John Huston, as always, makes movies for grown-ups)

STAIRCASE (Stanley Donen, 1969) – Still Hollywood’s greatest gay film, its expressive mise-en-scene conveys the universal experience of the domestic impact of aging male ego—a gay "marriage" providing the opportunity to explore the full range of this theme doubly poignantly: from hair tonics to sexual indiscretion (As the middle-aged couple, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison give their best-ever performances)

LUDWIG (Luchino Visconti, 1973) – The gay epic of one’s dreams: Imagine the true story of a queer King with the means to build palaces that reflect his personal sense of life and his country’s Romanticism (Wagner-inspired); in other words, it’s an existential triumph and a political tragedy (Last year’s Pride season heralded the US release of the full director’s cut in theaters—it should have changed (but didn't) gay culture and movie history forever, deflating each Pride float's gay capitulation to consumerism; in other words, it’s an existential-political catastrophe)

COME BACK TO THE 5 & DIME JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN (Robert Altman, 1982) – A torch singer cometh to expose essential—spiritual—deceptions, thus rendering the ache embedded in human sexuality through the reproductive yearning of a spectral victim of a gay-bashing and gang rape named Joe (*sigh* Mark Patton) and the mysteriously connected regret and resignation of the richest transexual characterization in movie history (Altman’s Jimmy Dean and his army-barracks follow-up Streamers (1983) remain the peak achievements in American gay cinema; Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, and Cher in their best-ever performances)

QUERELLE (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982) – "We have Jesus to thank that we are able to glorify humility;" the philosophical implications of gay desire and gay sex manifest themselves cinematically: Expressionist phallic soundstage, Surrealist desire-driven narrative, Brechtian liberation of film codes, and the tactile sense of the male physique (Brad Davies! Sailors!) (Adapting Genet, Fassbinder's final film distilled his didactic oeuvre to its Un chant d'amour essence—and then transcended it)

THE COLOR PURPLE (Steven Spielberg, 1985) - THE COLOR PURPLE (Steven Spielberg, 1985)* - After the supernal bond in E.T. moved the world, Spielberg dared to dramatize the essential innocence in a Black lesbian character's consummated desires for her husband's mistress as a longing for love experienced in childhood between two sisters, agonizingly separated as in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm by political forces (here: patriarchal, Jim Crowe), and to provide catharsis in the beneficent fulfillment of hope (Proof for its inclusion on a list of specialized cinema: Everyone loves this movie, everyone knows it, and there isn't a Tyler Perry play that doesn't quote it)

THE LONG DAY CLOSES (Terence Davies, 1993) – Family (absent father), cultural (English, Catholic), and Pop-cultural (movie, music) heritage provides expansive material mined by Davies for breathtaking visual and sonic epiphanies that express an autobiographical gay boy's experience of loneliness, and consequent unexpressed feeling, pangs of attraction and shame, and warm respite in kinship and at the movies (Simply put: THE GREATEST GAY FILM OF ALL TIME—OFFICIALLY!)

SAVAGE NIGHTS* (Cyril Collard, 1994) - Don't let the film's autobiographical audacity (the one-time writer-director-star died of AIDS just before sweeping the 1992 Cesar Awards) overshadow its artistic urgency, which gives AIDS-era existential weight to the passions and couplings of a bisexual love triangle and challenges each character's sense of self (The unforgettable final sequence--pure cinema--echoed that of Alan Rudolph's 1993 Equinox Grand Canyon climax: phenomenological expression of identity through awe of nature--and established my ideal for movie endings)

WILD REEDS (Andre Techine, 1995) – The greatest coming-of-age film of all time captures the heightened sensation of maturing out of adolescence into sexual and political awakening (beyond binaries to discover shared humanity) and moral and social challenge—literally misting up as I think of the ending, a heartbreaking cry to a friend that signals a non-diegetic pop-music queue, two sounds everyone will recognize (Techine is the second greatest living filmmaker, whose Being 17 (2016), The Witnesses (2008), and I Don't Kiss (1991), to name just three gay-cinema peaks, would easily have sat high on this list)

HAPPY TOGETHER (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997) – The still-definitive break-up, make-up, break-up gay movie ingeniously expresses its Chinese lovers' romantic disturbance in relief to their spatial dislocation in the urban and natural settings on a trip to Argentina so that form follows feeling—dazzling transitions in film-stock and -speed achieves phenomenological awe and pop catharsis (With China's leading auteur teaming with the country's two greatest male stars, it's the nearest reach for the Sternberg-Dietrich ring of film Romanticism yet in gay movies)

THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN (Patrice Chereau, 1999) – The primal appeal of The Big Chill given operatic, cinematic largesse through unencumbered Cinemascope as art-hounds-on-the-brink descend upon Limoges for their maestro's funeral, where hetero-couplings get tested, transgender identity confounds then conveys universal longings, and the proposal to live life imaginatively in the age of AIDS for a gay-male love triangle—each actor like marble chiseled by light—climaxes in one of the top 5 most awesome movie endings—an angel's eye view that breaks boundaries and defeats death (R.I.P. Patrice Chereau, whose Those Love Me Can Take the Train (1999), Son frere (2004), and Queen Margot (1994) are the most "me" of movies)

THREE DANCING SLAVES (Gael Morel, 2005) – Raising the codes of gay porn to the level of high art gives liberating erotic force to the film's homosocial exploration of three brothers traversing masculine expectations in dynamics of fraternity, family, capitalism, and, most radically, gay intimacy, which extends to compassion and, finally through heartbreak, to imaginative engagement (Since I've been resorting to superlatives, here's another: Fulfilling Pauline Kael's porno-art dream, this is the hottest movie of all time, or at least since A Place in the Sun.)

RAGING SUN, RAGING SKY (Julian Hernandez, 2009) – In this "Mythologies" of gay cruising, three characters achingly yearn for connection but when two find each other and another is left heartbroken, the quest transforms into a literal pagan Mexican Creation myth that hinges on the gay lovers' extension of their relationship into radical compassion—answering the challenge to gay love's gratuitous potential; call it: "The Metaphysics of the Third Wheel" (Mexico's Julian Hernandez is the only master filmmaker to emerge in the 21st Century, so seek out the first two films in the trilogy this film completes: A Thousand Clouds of Peace (2004) and Broken Sky (2006), as well as I Am Happiness on Earth (2014), Tattoo of Revenge (2019), and the short film collection Mexican Men (2016))

YOSSI (Eytan Fox, 2013) – Through a queered social perspective that achieves both unabashed gay romanticism (masculine delicacy, spiritual renewal) and penetrating cultural insight (divining spiritual turmoil in political reality), the state of Yossi (grieving his lost love, a fellow soldier) reflects the theological quandary of the State of Israel, seeking a home, seeking the Other (When Yossi (Ohad Knoller) exposes his vulnerability to a gorgeous soldier, the embrace that ensues achieves the power of parable)

4 MOONS (Sergio Tovar Velarde, 2014) – Four crosscut narratives, recalling Griffith and Altman, focus on different stages in gay-male development to unveil one surprising emotional-cultural truth-insight after another through juxtaposition, synchronicity, and morally evocative overlap while each sequence evinces amazingly feelingful staging, lighting and directing of actors—such as that in which mother and son watch/talk about a telenovela with ravishing intensity (It's a new masterpiece—and a new Christmas classic; Also: Is Hugo Catalán the most beautiful man in movies today?)

PARIS 05:59: THEO & HUGO (Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, 2017) – With the intensity achieved by a fleet 97-minutes set in real-time, movement in Cinemascope space thrusts its lovers into the social world and, most profoundly, into the future beyond the dread and longing inherent in modern mating rituals (anonymous sex, intimacy, AIDS scare/treatment). (Inspired (as always) by the musicals of Jacques Demy, the filmmakers combine gay sex-club grit and movie-musical stylization to quote and redeem the unforgettable utopian kitsch of West Side Story to make time stand still during the film's audacious 18-minute opening orgy.)

This probably is not a gay movie 100%, but it is very interesting and I recommend it.
And the band played on is a 1993 American television film docudrama about the discovery of the AIDS epidemic, and the political infighting of the scientific community hampering the early fight with it. With Matthew Modine, Alan Alda, Phil Collins, Richard Gere, Anjelica Houston, Steve Martin, BD Wong, Ian McKellen.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O38zYpzqdZg

If you like that, wait until you see Andre Techine’s THE WITNESSES 😳 🚀 😭

Haven't seen my favorite mentioned yet: Weekend

https://youtu.be/2IFbcWG1F9o

Updated again -- adding 2 films for a 21.

PRIDE '21: THE 21 GREATEST GAY FILMS OF ALL TIME
A CHRONOLOGY
(One per filmmaker)


2021: Overcoming the challenges posed by the 21st Century's plagues hinges on gays reclaiming the legacy represented by this personal cinematic chronology--a declaration of independence from the literal/metaphorical viruses that would deny gay capacity for expressing desire, for resisting received-wisdom, and, most significantly, for the healing gesture:

PRIDE '21: THE 21 GREATEST GAY FILMS OF ALL TIME
A CHRONOLOGY
(One per filmmaker)
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/johnd...s-of-all-time/

MICHAEL (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924) – An older man and master artist's desire for the ideal of masculine beauty inspires art born of sacrifice, which is to say, of Love, in the midst of a definitively rendered art-world demimonde teeming with heterosexual infidelity (A Master spiritual filmmaker goes beyond his era’s fashionable politics—and ours)

THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) – Three outsiders in the South, two queer white kids and a Black housekeeper, bear the social burdens of individuality and responsibility, together and—then apart (Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, and Brandon De Wilde create definitive American gay Myths, bringing Carson McCullers to life)

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) – Tennessee Williams definitively reveals the exploitative decadence—"Tired of the dark ones, famished for the blond ones"—of Wildean gay culture through the unraveling of a repressed memory/mystery of a gay aesthete's bizarre death (As seen through a glass sympathetically by Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift)

THE GRIM REAPER (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962) – A Rashomon of cruising that charts the connection between sex, commerce, and illicit subculture through the interrogation flashbacks of various hetero-male characters' private agons orbiting the murder of a female prostitute, culminating in the film’s slumming gay John alone rising above shame to civic duty and compassionate action (Bertolucci’s debut gives poetic, sensual—cinematic—heft to Pasolini’s devastating insights)

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (John Huston, 1967) – Things heat up on a military base when Marlon Brando represses his desire for "bare-backed and bare-assed" horse-riding Robert Forster by romanticizing the orderly military “life of men among men,” leading inexorably to domestic disaster with wife Elizabeth Taylor (With the second adaptation of McCullers on the list, auteur John Huston, as always, makes movies for grown-ups)

STAIRCASE (Stanley Donen, 1969) – Still Hollywood’s greatest gay film, its expressive mise-en-scene conveys the universal experience of the domestic impact of aging male ego—a gay "marriage" providing the opportunity to explore the full range of this theme doubly poignantly: from hair tonics to sexual indiscretion (As the middle-aged couple, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison give their best-ever performances)

LUDWIG (Luchino Visconti, 1973) – The gay epic of one’s dreams: Imagine the true story of a queer King with the means to build palaces that reflect his personal sense of life and his country’s Romanticism (Wagner-inspired); in other words, it’s an existential triumph and a political tragedy (Last year’s Pride season heralded the US release of the full director’s cut in theaters—it should have changed (but didn't) gay culture and movie history forever, deflating each Pride float's gay capitulation to consumerism; in other words, it’s an existential-political catastrophe)

COME BACK TO THE 5 & DIME JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN (Robert Altman, 1982) – A torch singer cometh to expose essential—spiritual—deceptions, thus rendering the ache embedded in human sexuality through the reproductive yearning of a spectral victim of a gay-bashing and gang rape named Joe (*sigh* Mark Patton) and the mysteriously connected regret and resignation of the richest transexual characterization in movie history (Altman’s Jimmy Dean and his army-barracks follow-up Streamers (1983) remain the peak achievements in American gay cinema; Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, and Cher in their best-ever performances)

QUERELLE (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982) – "We have Jesus to thank that we are able to glorify humility;" the philosophical implications of gay desire and gay sex manifest themselves cinematically: Expressionist phallic soundstage, Surrealist desire-driven narrative, Brechtian liberation of film codes, and the tactile sense of the male physique (Brad Davies! Sailors!) (Adapting Genet, Fassbinder's final film distilled his didactic oeuvre to its Un chant d'amour essence—and then transcended it)

THE COLOR PURPLE (Steven Spielberg, 1985) - THE COLOR PURPLE (Steven Spielberg, 1985) - After the supernal bond in E.T. moved the world, Spielberg dared to dramatize the essential innocence in a Black lesbian character's consummated desires for her husband's mistress as a longing for love experienced in childhood between two sisters, agonizingly separated as in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm by political forces (here: patriarchal, Jim Crowe), and to provide catharsis in the beneficent fulfillment of hope (Proof for its inclusion on a list of specialized cinema: Everyone loves this movie, everyone knows it, and there isn't a Tyler Perry play that doesn't quote it)

THE LONG DAY CLOSES (Terence Davies, 1993) – Family (absent father), cultural (English, Catholic), and Pop-cultural (movie, music) heritage provides expansive material mined by Davies for breathtaking visual and sonic epiphanies that express an autobiographical gay boy's experience of loneliness, and consequent unexpressed feeling, pangs of attraction and shame, and warm respite in kinship and at the movies (Simply put: THE GREATEST GAY FILM OF ALL TIME—OFFICIALLY!)

WILD REEDS (Andre Techine, 1995) – The greatest coming-of-age film of all time captures the heightened sensation of maturing out of adolescence into sexual and political awakening (beyond binaries to discover shared humanity) and moral and social challenge—literally misting up as I think of the ending, a heartbreaking cry to a friend that signals a non-diegetic pop-music queue, two sounds everyone will recognize (Techine is the second greatest living filmmaker, whose Being 17 (2016), The Witnesses (2008), and I Don't Kiss (1991), to name just three gay-cinema peaks, would easily have sat high on this list)

HAPPY TOGETHER (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997) – The still-definitive break-up, make-up, break-up gay movie ingeniously expresses its Chinese lovers' romantic disturbance in relief to their spatial dislocation in the urban and natural settings on a trip to Argentina so that form follows feeling—dazzling transitions in film-stock and -speed achieves phenomenological awe and pop catharsis (With China's leading auteur teaming with the country's two greatest male stars, it's the nearest reach for the Sternberg-Dietrich ring of film Romanticism yet in gay movies)

THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN (Patrice Chereau, 1999) – The primal appeal of The Big Chill given operatic, cinematic largesse through unencumbered Cinemascope as art-hounds-on-the-brink descend upon Limoges for their maestro's funeral, where hetero-couplings get tested, transgender identity confounds then conveys universal longings, and the proposal to live life imaginatively in the age of AIDS for a gay-male love triangle—each actor like marble chiseled by light—climaxes in one of the top 5 most awesome movie endings—an angel's eye view that breaks boundaries and defeats death (R.I.P. Patrice Chereau, whose Those Love Me Can Take the Train (1999), Son frere (2004), and Queen Margot (1994) are the most "me" of movies)

THREE DANCING SLAVES (Gael Morel, 2005) – Raising the codes of gay porn to the level of high art gives liberating erotic force to the film's homosocial exploration of three brothers traversing masculine expectations in dynamics of fraternity, family, capitalism, and, most radically, gay intimacy, which extends to compassion and, finally through heartbreak, to imaginative engagement (Since I've been resorting to superlatives, here's another: Fulfilling Pauline Kael's porno-art dream, this is the hottest movie of all time, or at least since A Place in the Sun.)

GARCON STUPIDE (Lionel Baier, 2005) – Baier's debut achieves cinematic summits that challenge gay hegemony with sexual frankness (graphic internet hookups) and, then, most astonishingly, with the mystery of individuality in three sequences in which digital filmmaking first achieved the sublime: a gay pride parade mantra surpassing My Life On Ice, a carousel rhapsody worthy of Lola, and mountain-top transcendence anticipating 4 Days in France (Irrefutable: the influence felt in films as radical as Francois Ozon's Summer of 85 (2021) and reactionary as Love, Simon (2018) proves Garçon stupide passes the test of time)

RAGING SUN, RAGING SKY (Julian Hernandez, 2009) – In this "Mythologies" of gay cruising, three characters achingly yearn for connection but when two find each other and another is left heartbroken, the quest transforms into a literal pagan Mexican Creation myth that hinges on the gay lovers' extension of their relationship into radical compassion—answering the challenge to gay love's gratuitous potential; call it: "The Metaphysics of the Third Wheel" (Mexico's Julian Hernandez is the only master filmmaker to emerge in the 21st Century, so seek out the first two films in the trilogy this film completes: A Thousand Clouds of Peace (2004) and Broken Sky (2006), as well as I Am Happiness on Earth (2014), Tattoo of Revenge (2019), and the short film collection Mexican Men (2016))

YOSSI (Eytan Fox, 2013) – Through a queered social perspective that achieves both unabashed gay romanticism (masculine delicacy, spiritual renewal) and penetrating cultural insight (divining spiritual turmoil in political reality), the state of Yossi (grieving his lost love, a fellow soldier) reflects the theological quandary of the State of Israel, seeking a home, seeking the Other (When Yossi (Ohad Knoller) exposes his vulnerability to a gorgeous soldier, the embrace that ensues achieves the power of parable)

4 MOONS (Sergio Tovar Velarde, 2014) – Four crosscut narratives, recalling Griffith and Altman, focus on different stages in gay-male development to unveil one surprising emotional-cultural truth-insight after another through juxtaposition, synchronicity, and morally evocative overlap while each sequence evinces amazingly feelingful staging, lighting and directing of actors—such as that in which mother and son watch/talk about a telenovela with ravishing intensity (It's a new masterpiece—and a new Christmas classic; Also: Is Hugo Catalán the most beautiful man in movies today?)

PARIS 05:59: THEO & HUGO (Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, 2017) – With the intensity achieved by a fleet 97-minutes set in real-time, movement in Cinemascope space thrusts its lovers into the social world and, most profoundly, into the future beyond the dread and longing inherent in modern mating rituals (anonymous sex, intimacy, AIDS scare/treatment). (Inspired (as always) by the musicals of Jacques Demy, the filmmakers combine gay sex-club grit and movie-musical stylization to quote and redeem the unforgettable utopian kitsch of West Side Story to make time stand still during the film's audacious 18-minute opening orgy.)

STRAIGHT UP (James Sweeney, 2020) – The best rom-com of the 21st century challenges identity-politics shibboleths through the leads' un-PC shared yearning/sense-of-humor (call it "chemistry") and director-writer-star Sweeney's formal, yet expressive, audacity cataloguing techniques to film dialogue--what David Bordwell refers to as "parametric cinema"--culminating in a three-way scrabble game as surreally transgressive as Kubrick's Star Baby in 2001 (This new classic surpasses the best American Indies since 1991's New Queer Cinema: Gregg Araki's Nowhere (1997), Patrik-Ian Polk's The Skinny (2012), and Joseph Graham's Beautiful Something (2015))

Updated again -- adding 1 films for a 22

PRIDE '22: THE 22 GREATEST GAY FILMS OF ALL TIME
A CHRONOLOGY
(One per filmmaker)


2022: In 1984, the year of Prince's Purple Rain film and album triumphs, Armond White challenged American filmmakers to make a work of art in the genre known as "kid pix"--to demonstrate teenagers' relationship to pop culture and consequent political awakening and moral challenge. Implied in this challenge was for a film to match the sexual license of Prince's phenomenal album. Nearly 40 years later, that film arrived with Stephen Kijack's Shoplifters of the World in the context of cancel culture and a new lexicon of gender and sexual identity, which it transcended and, thus, universal media neglect canceled the movie itself. It was my first, and remains the peak, moviegoing experience in the post-lockdown world. Hence, this list stands, as always, as anti-hype in the face of cultural hegemony:

PRIDE '22: THE 22 GREATEST GAY FILMS OF ALL TIME
A CHRONOLOGY
(One per filmmaker)
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/johnd...s-of-all-time/

MICHAEL (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924) – An older man and master artist's desire for the ideal of masculine beauty inspires art born of sacrifice, which is to say, of Love, in the midst of a definitively rendered art-world demimonde teeming with heterosexual infidelity (A Master spiritual filmmaker goes beyond his era’s fashionable politics—and ours)

THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) – Three outsiders in the South, two queer white kids and a Black housekeeper, bear the social burdens of individuality and responsibility, together and—then apart (Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, and Brandon De Wilde create definitive American gay Myths, bringing Carson McCullers to life)

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) – Tennessee Williams definitively reveals the exploitative decadence—"Tired of the dark ones, famished for the blond ones"—of Wildean gay culture through the unraveling of a repressed memory/mystery of a gay aesthete's bizarre death (As seen through a glass sympathetically by Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift)

THE GRIM REAPER (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962) – A Rashomon of cruising that charts the connection between sex, commerce, and illicit subculture through the interrogation flashbacks of various hetero-male characters' private agons orbiting the murder of a female prostitute, culminating in the film’s slumming gay John alone rising above shame to civic duty and compassionate action (Bertolucci’s debut gives poetic, sensual—cinematic—heft to Pasolini’s devastating insights)

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (John Huston, 1967) – Things heat up on a military base when Marlon Brando represses his desire for "bare-backed and bare-assed" horse-riding Robert Forster by romanticizing the orderly military “life of men among men,” leading inexorably to domestic disaster with wife Elizabeth Taylor (With the second adaptation of McCullers on the list, auteur John Huston, as always, makes movies for grown-ups)

STAIRCASE (Stanley Donen, 1969) – Still Hollywood’s greatest gay film, its expressive mise-en-scene conveys the universal experience of the domestic impact of aging male ego—a gay "marriage" providing the opportunity to explore the full range of this theme doubly poignantly: from hair tonics to sexual indiscretion (As the middle-aged couple, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison give their best-ever performances)

LUDWIG (Luchino Visconti, 1973) – The gay epic of one’s dreams: Imagine the true story of a queer King with the means to build palaces that reflect his personal sense of life and his country’s Romanticism (Wagner-inspired); in other words, it’s an existential triumph and a political tragedy (Last year’s Pride season heralded the US release of the full director’s cut in theaters—it should have changed (but didn't) gay culture and movie history forever, deflating each Pride float's gay capitulation to consumerism; in other words, it’s an existential-political catastrophe)

COME BACK TO THE 5 & DIME JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN (Robert Altman, 1982) – A torch singer cometh to expose essential—spiritual—deceptions, thus rendering the ache embedded in human sexuality through the reproductive yearning of a spectral victim of a gay-bashing and gang rape named Joe (*sigh* Mark Patton) and the mysteriously connected regret and resignation of the richest transexual characterization in movie history (Altman’s Jimmy Dean and his army-barracks follow-up Streamers (1983) remain the peak achievements in American gay cinema; Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, and Cher in their best-ever performances)

QUERELLE (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982) – "We have Jesus to thank that we are able to glorify humility;" the philosophical implications of gay desire and gay sex manifest themselves cinematically: Expressionist phallic soundstage, Surrealist desire-driven narrative, Brechtian liberation of film codes, and the tactile sense of the male physique (Brad Davies! Sailors!) (Adapting Genet, Fassbinder's final film distilled his didactic oeuvre to its Un chant d'amour essence—and then transcended it)

THE COLOR PURPLE (Steven Spielberg, 1985) - THE COLOR PURPLE (Steven Spielberg, 1985) - After the supernal bond in E.T. moved the world, Spielberg dared to dramatize the essential innocence in a Black lesbian character's consummated desires for her husband's mistress as a longing for love experienced in childhood between two sisters, agonizingly separated as in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm by political forces (here: patriarchal, Jim Crowe), and to provide catharsis in the beneficent fulfillment of hope (Proof for its inclusion on a list of specialized cinema: Everyone loves this movie, everyone knows it, and there isn't a Tyler Perry play that doesn't quote it)

THE LONG DAY CLOSES (Terence Davies, 1993) – Family (absent father), cultural (English, Catholic), and Pop-cultural (movie, music) heritage provides expansive material mined by Davies for breathtaking visual and sonic epiphanies that express an autobiographical gay boy's experience of loneliness, and consequent unexpressed feeling, pangs of attraction and shame, and warm respite in kinship and at the movies (Simply put: THE GREATEST GAY FILM OF ALL TIME—OFFICIALLY!)

WILD REEDS (Andre Techine, 1995) – The greatest coming-of-age film of all time captures the heightened sensation of maturing out of adolescence into sexual and political awakening (beyond binaries to discover shared humanity) and moral and social challenge—literally misting up as I think of the ending, a heartbreaking cry to a friend that signals a non-diegetic pop-music queue, two sounds everyone will recognize (Techine is the second greatest living filmmaker, whose Being 17 (2016), The Witnesses (2008), and I Don't Kiss (1991), to name just three gay-cinema peaks, would easily have sat high on this list)

HAPPY TOGETHER (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997) – The still-definitive break-up, make-up, break-up gay movie ingeniously expresses its Chinese lovers' romantic disturbance in relief to their spatial dislocation in the urban and natural settings on a trip to Argentina so that form follows feeling—dazzling transitions in film-stock and -speed achieves phenomenological awe and pop catharsis (With China's leading auteur teaming with the country's two greatest male stars, it's the nearest reach for the Sternberg-Dietrich ring of film Romanticism yet in gay movies)

THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN (Patrice Chereau, 1999) – The primal appeal of The Big Chill given operatic, cinematic largesse through unencumbered Cinemascope as art-hounds-on-the-brink descend upon Limoges for their maestro's funeral, where hetero-couplings get tested, transgender identity confounds then conveys universal longings, and the proposal to live life imaginatively in the age of AIDS for a gay-male love triangle—each actor like marble chiseled by light—climaxes in one of the top 5 most awesome movie endings—an angel's eye view that breaks boundaries and defeats death (R.I.P. Patrice Chereau, whose Those Love Me Can Take the Train (1999), Son frere (2004), and Queen Margot (1994) are the most "me" of movies)

THREE DANCING SLAVES (Gael Morel, 2005) – Raising the codes of gay porn to the level of high art gives liberating erotic force to the film's homosocial exploration of three brothers traversing masculine expectations in dynamics of fraternity, family, capitalism, and, most radically, gay intimacy, which extends to compassion and, finally through heartbreak, to imaginative engagement (Since I've been resorting to superlatives, here's another: Fulfilling Pauline Kael's porno-art dream, this is the hottest movie of all time, or at least since A Place in the Sun.)

GARCON STUPIDE (Lionel Baier, 2005) – Baier's debut achieves cinematic summits that challenge gay hegemony with sexual frankness (graphic internet hookups) and, then, most astonishingly, with the mystery of individuality in three sequences in which digital filmmaking first achieved the sublime: a gay pride parade mantra surpassing My Life On Ice, a carousel rhapsody worthy of Lola, and mountain-top transcendence anticipating 4 Days in France (Irrefutable: the influence felt in films as radical as Francois Ozon's Summer of 85 (2021) and reactionary as Love, Simon (2018) proves Garçon stupide passes the test of time)

RAGING SUN, RAGING SKY (Julian Hernandez, 2009) – In this "Mythologies" of gay cruising, three characters achingly yearn for connection but when two find each other and another is left heartbroken, the quest transforms into a literal pagan Mexican Creation myth that hinges on the gay lovers' extension of their relationship into radical compassion—answering the challenge to gay love's gratuitous potential; call it: "The Metaphysics of the Third Wheel" (Mexico's Julian Hernandez is the only master filmmaker to emerge in the 21st Century, so seek out the first two films in the trilogy this film completes: A Thousand Clouds of Peace (2004) and Broken Sky (2006), as well as I Am Happiness on Earth (2014), Tattoo of Revenge (2019), and the short film collection Mexican Men (2016))

YOSSI (Eytan Fox, 2013) – Through a queered social perspective that achieves both unabashed gay romanticism (masculine delicacy, spiritual renewal) and penetrating cultural insight (divining spiritual turmoil in political reality), the state of Yossi (grieving his lost love, a fellow soldier) reflects the theological quandary of the State of Israel, seeking a home, seeking the Other (When Yossi (Ohad Knoller) exposes his vulnerability to a gorgeous soldier, the embrace that ensues achieves the power of parable)

4 MOONS (Sergio Tovar Velarde, 2014) – Four crosscut narratives, recalling Griffith and Altman, focus on different stages in gay-male development to unveil one surprising emotional-cultural truth-insight after another through juxtaposition, synchronicity, and morally evocative overlap while each sequence evinces amazingly feelingful staging, lighting and directing of actors—such as that in which mother and son watch/talk about a telenovela with ravishing intensity (It's a new masterpiece—and a new Christmas classic; Also: Is Hugo Catalán the most beautiful man in movies today?)

PARIS 05:59: THEO & HUGO (Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, 2017) – With the intensity achieved by a fleet 97-minutes set in real-time, movement in Cinemascope space thrusts its lovers into the social world and, most profoundly, into the future beyond the dread and longing inherent in modern mating rituals (anonymous sex, intimacy, AIDS scare/treatment). (Inspired (as always) by the musicals of Jacques Demy, the filmmakers combine gay sex-club grit and movie-musical stylization to quote and redeem the unforgettable utopian kitsch of West Side Story to make time stand still during the film's audacious 18-minute opening orgy.)

STRAIGHT UP (James Sweeney, 2020) – The best rom-com of the 21st century challenges identity-politics shibboleths through the leads' un-PC shared yearning/sense-of-humor (call it "chemistry") and director-writer-star Sweeney's formal, yet expressive, audacity cataloguing techniques to film dialogue--what David Bordwell refers to as "parametric cinema"--culminating in a three-way scrabble game as surreally transgressive as Kubrick's Star Baby in 2001 (This new classic surpasses the best American Indies since 1991's New Queer Cinema: Gregg Araki's Nowhere (1997), Patrik-Ian Polk's The Skinny (2012), and Joseph Graham's Beautiful Something (2015))[/QUOTE]

SHOPLIFTERS OF THE WORLD (Stephen Kijak, 2021) - The soundtrack of songs by The Smiths—the greatest rock band of all time—expresses a day of revelations for its characters returning home from freshman-year at college while the narrative analyzes the music of The Smiths, so that the band’s gay sub-cult subversion and radical compassion revitalizes hetero rom-com ritual and creates definitive Myths of YA self-discovery (A pitch-perfect detour trip to a small-city 1980s gay club complicates "coming out" with dizzying moral-political challenge by conflating The Smiths' AIDS-era lament "Death of a Disco Dancer" and universal longing in "Asleep" and, then, by visualizing resistance against gay-bashing oppression in the figure of a queen in Nightclubbing-era Grace Jones drag)