Best Lgbt Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of lgbt cinema — measured across 9,492 indexed frames from 143 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Lgbt films over-index on cigarette, pillow and mirror — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
Paris Is Burning (1990)
Jennie LivingstonDP Paul GibsonIMDb 8.2TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →
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 American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, PARIS IS BURNING offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion "houses," from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women — including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza.
- 2
Maestro (2023)
Bradley CooperDP Matthew LibatiqueIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.3See in full on FrameThrower →
A towering and fearless love story chronicling the lifelong relationship between Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein. A love letter to life and art, Maestro at its core is an emotionally epic portrayal of family and love.
- 3
Anna (2019)
Luc BessonDP Thierry ArbogastIMDb 6.7TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →
Anna (Sasha Luss) is a young beautiful girl who managed to make a career in the fashion world. More recently, she was a simple model from Moscow, but in a very short time, she was able to enter the elite. Once she entered the hotel of an influential and very dangerous person, after which a whole mountain of corpses was discovered there. The girl is being interrogated by special services, but she has absolutely nothing to tell them on this fact. She looks scared, and no one suspects her. Anna goes free and begins preparing for a new business. Under the guise of a fragile beauty, is hiding the world's most dangerous assassin, who has not yet misfired.
- 4
Xavier DolanDP Stéphanie Weber BironIMDb 7.0TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →
Francis is a young gay man, Marie is a young straight woman and the two of them are best friends -- until the day the gorgeous Nicolas walks into a Montreal coffee shop. The two friends, instantly and equally infatuated, compete for Nicolas' indeterminate affections, a conflict that climaxes when the trio visit the vacation home of Nicolas' mother. The frothy comedy unfolds through narrative, fantasy sequences and confessional monologues.
- 5
Blue Is The Warmest Colour (2013)
Abdellatif KechicheDP Sofian El FaniIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →
Adèle is a high school student who is beginning to explore herself as a woman. She dates men but finds no satisfaction with them sexually, and is rejected by a female friend who she does desire. She dreams of something more. She meets Emma who is a free spirited girl whom Adèle's friends reject due to her sexuality, and by association most begin to reject Adèle. Her relationship with Emma grows into more than just friends as she is the only person with whom she can express herself openly. Together, Adèle and Emma explore social acceptance, sexuality, and the emotional spectrum of their maturing relationship.
- 6
Beach Rats (2017)
Eliza HittmanDP Hélène LouvartIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.0See in full on FrameThrower →
An aimless teenager on the outer edges of Brooklyn struggles to escape his bleak home life and navigate questions of self-identity, as he balances his time between his delinquent friends, a potential new girlfriend, and older men he meets online.
- 7
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
John SchlesingerDP Adam HolenderIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
Texas greenhorn Joe Buck arrives in New York City for the first time. Preening himself as a real "hustler", he finds that he is the one getting "hustled" until he teams up with down-and-out but resilient outcast Ratso Rizzo. The initial "country cousin meets city cousin" relationship deepens. In their efforts to bilk a hostile world rebuffing them at every turn, this unlikely pair progress from partners in shady business to comrades. Each has found his first real friend.
- 8
Red, White & Royal Blue (2023)
Matthew LópezDP Stephen GoldblattIMDb 7.0TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →
Taylor Zakhar Perezas Alex Claremont-Diaz
Nicholas Galitzineas Henry Hanover-Stuart Fox
Uma Thurmanas Ellen Claremont
After an altercation between Alex, the president's son, and Britain's Prince Henry at a royal event becomes tabloid fodder, their long-running feud now threatens to drive a wedge in U.S./British relations. When the rivals are forced into a staged truce, their icy relationship begins to thaw and the friction between them sparks something deeper than they ever expected.
- 9
All About My Mother (1999)
Pedro AlmodóvarDP Affonso BeatoIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →
Argentine Manuela Echevarria, an organ transplant coordinator at a Madrid hospital, ran off from her husband in Barcelona eighteen years ago upon learning that she was pregnant, their son, Esteban, who she has never told about his father despite his curiosity, and her husband who didn't know about the pregnancy when she ran off. An event coinciding with Esteban, an aspiring writer, turning seventeen leads to Manuela feeling the need to return to Barcelona to look for her husband. There, she ends up further acting as the maternal figure for people in need. One is a young nun named Sister Rosa, who she meets through her old friend, a transvestite prostitute who has assumed the name Agrado in her agreeable nature. Rosa has a strained relationship with her own conservative mother, as she is consumed with caring for her ill husband, who suffers from Alzheimer's. The other is actress Huma Rojo, currently appearing as Blanche Dubois in a stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which has long been a touchstone for Manuela in productions of it coinciding with milestone moments in her life, this production no different. Huma is in a troubled codependent relationship with her younger "Stella Kowalski" costar Nina Cruz, a closet junkie, hence Huma's emotional need for support. By the end of her stay in Barcelona, Manuela will have another non-relative for who she will feel the need to act as a mother figure.
- 10
Kill Your Darlings (2013)
John KrokidasDP Reed MoranoIMDb 6.4TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →
In the early 1940s, Allen Ginsberg is an English major at Columbia University, only to learn more than he bargained for. Dissatisfied by the orthodox attitudes of the school, Allen finds himself drawn to iconoclastic colleagues like Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Together, this gang would explore bold new literary ideas that would challenge the sensibilities of their time as the future Beat Generation. However, for all their creativity, their very appetites and choices lead to more serious transgressions that would mark their lives forever.
What lgbt films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a lgbt frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — cigarette is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- cigarette2.4×
- pillow1.7×
- mirror1.6×
- necklace1.6×
- t-shirt1.5×
How lgbt films are shot
Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate lgbt from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 87%eye levelvs 69% baseline
What breaks the pattern
Nimona (2023) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 9,492 frames from 143 films carrying the lgbt label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/lgbt
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