Michael Koresky

This touchstone of nineties independent filmmaking is a reminder that true queer cinema is about taking risks and breaking taboos—an increasingly rare thing in our corporatized entertainment culture.

In Albert Lewin’s cagey adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, homosexuality is viewed as it was in much of classical Hollywood cinema: as an eerie monstrosity.

A racist, traditionally desexualized archetype from classic Hollywood gets queered and eroticized in Cheryl Dunye’s indie landmark The Watermelon Woman, now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Whether sublimated or made explicit, that longing feeling so specific to the queer experience has always existed in the movies. A new series on the Criterion Channel dives into this richly layered but long-suppressed cinematic history.

With megawatt performers in front of the camera and remarkable talent behind the scenes, the golden-age MGM musical became Hollywood’s most utopian expression of joy.

Now playing on the Criterion Channel, Christopher Munch’s New Queer Cinema landmark The Hours and Times excavates a gay fantasy from the annals of Fab Four lore.

The Platters’ impassioned rendition of the pop chestnut “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” highlights the irrevocable loss in Andrew Haigh’s marriage drama.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder plays a working-class gay man hoodwinked by his uppity bourgeois lover in this unsparing portrait of queer culture in 1970s West Germany.

In Phoenix, Christian Petzold sets his nuanced melodrama of postwar German-Jewish identity within a starkly realist aesthetic, making newly fascinating use of his enduring interest in the tensions between the real and the artificial.

Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.

Brian De Palma magnifies the pleasures and perils of Hitchcock and toys with the viewer’s spectatorship in his sly and scary horror masterpiece.

The films Agnès Varda made while living on the West Coast of the United States are some of the most searching and challenging of her stellar career.

Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a

future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.

Who is Tootsie, anyway?

The prolific and popular Keisuke Kinoshita made his fascinating first movies at a time of great difficulty and censorship, yet their spirit and brilliance shine through.

Terence Davies beckons the viewer into a private world of moods and sensations with this exquisite childhood reverie.

Satyajit Ray was ailing when he made them, but these three works from the great filmmaker’s final years show an artist at the height of his powers.

From the beginning, it was clear that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was destined to shake up German cinema.