Our list of the 200 Best LGBTQ+ Movies of All Time stretches back 90 years to the pioneering German film, Mädchen in Uniform, which was subsequently banned by the Nazis, and crosses multiple continents, cultures, and genres. Read: Critic Valerie Complex on Pariah, and how it changed her lifeĪll of these films stand on the shoulders of other LGBTQ+ films that have come before.Read: Critic Manuel Betancourt on seminal LGBTQ+ comedy The Birdcage.Read: Critic Ian Thomas Malone on seminal trans film A Fantastic Woman.Watch: Cinematographer James Laxton breaks down the swimming lesson from Moonlight.Meanwhile comedy Midas Judd Apatow is currently producing a gay rom-com starring Billy on the Street’s Billy Eichner, which will hit theaters in Summer 2022. And it wasn’t the last: A lesbian romance lies at the center of critically acclaimed high school flick, Booksmart, as well as last year’s Christmas rom-com, The Happiest Season.
In 2020, Pedro Almadóvar’s Pain and Glory would make a dent on the awards circuit, as would Celine Sciamma’s romance Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, one of the best-reviewed movies of recent years. Meanwhile, Love, Simon made history in 2018 as the first mainstream, wide-release teenage rom-com to focus on a gay character (a spin-off TV series, Love, Victor, enters its second season on Hulu this year).
At the 2019 Oscars, Olivia Colman was named Best Actress for playing the lesbian queen Anne in The Favourite, beating out Can You Ever Forgive Me?‘s Melissa McCarthy, who played lesbian writer Lee Israel.
In 2016, Carol earned six Oscar nominations, and just a year later, for the first time in history, Moonlight became the first LGBTQ+-themed movie to win Best Picture. While the story has some holes and problems, the cast is energetic and committed and the result is a fairly entertaining, if somewhat rough, little diversion.It’s been a big few years for LGBTQ films.
The film takes place in the Philippines and is in a mixture of Tagalog and English. The ending of the film contains a twist that will surprise audiences who expect a light fluffy comedy.
The story bounces between Boyet's and Martha's fantasies about their boyfriends' commitment problems, and while each of the two character's love lives are well defined (both straight and gay and in between!), the method of the story telling makes dissecting fact from fantasy a bit of a challenge. Boyet has a live-in 'son', JoJo (Alcris Galura), a lad whose street life as an abandoned boy has stuck the heart of the mothering Boyet. Martha and Boyet are close friends, to the point that Boyet's writing career is focused on the love tangles of Martha as well as his own absentee lover situation with the manipulative Dom (Lauren Novero).
Boyet (Ricky Davao), a mother-like gay man who takes in stray cats (including the human form), lives in an apartment complex: his next door neighbor is Martha (Irma Adlawan), a successful business woman whose evenings are usually spent alone pining for her often absentee boyfriend of five years, Steve (Reggie Curley). Based on a play by Jun Lana and adapted for the screen by Rody Vera and writer/director Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil, the movie boasts a fine little cast and it is the cast's commitment to the project that sets the film sailing. STRAY CATS (PUSANG GALA) is a an odd but in the end endearing mixture of cinematic styles, soap opera drama, tender little comedy, and hefty measures of relationship philosophy: perhaps this is the Filipino brand of magical realism.