Great Queer & LGBTQ-Themed Films

Here are some feature-length films which excel as art and have interesting, meaningful, and nuanced stories about (or related to) queerness (and/or being queer as an Asian person) and/or offer a queer(ing) critique in their ideas/aesthetics/formal structure/etc. I align each film along Scott McCloud's artistic "campfires" (classicist, animist, iconoclast, formalist). All films on this list are also placed into my BL alignment chart, which organizes entries by thematic focus.

I'd also include the following films not on kisskh:

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) with a rating of 10: hilarious, irreverent, badass action film driven by the relationship between a mother and her queer daughter. Animist with classicist tendencies.
Goodbye Mother (2019) with a rating of 9.5: a quiet and beautiful story about family, transnational queerness, and love. Animist with classicist tendencies.
Saving Face (2004) with a rating of 9: hilarious romcom about family acceptance. Animist.

For an analogous list of drama series, see my S tier of LGBTQ & BL series. Various films which I am planning to watch as candidates to add to this list are in my watch queue.

Films in this list are ordered by greatness, where "great" should be understood as how much I personally appreciate the existence of that film as a work of art, and "great" is understood as a separate (more exclusive category) than just "good":

lietk12 Jan 3, 2021

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1. Dear Ex

Taiwanese Movie - 2018

10
A painful, melancholic, heartfelt, healing, and hilarious dramedy about love, illness, death, grief, and kinship in a heterosexist society. This beautiful film interrogates what it means to be a family.
Animist with classicist tendencies.
Recommended reviews/analysis:
- https://www.cinemaescapist.com/2019/02/dear-ex-movie-review/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aidYtWrVDs
2. So Long, See You Tomorrow

Korean Movie - 2021

10
3. Vive L'Amour

Taiwanese Movie - 1994

9.5
4. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Japanese Movie - 2021

9.5
5. Happy Together

Hong Kong Movie - 1997

9.5
6. A Distant Place

Korean Movie - 2020

9.5
A subtle, beautiful, and poetic slow-burn which covers similar narrative and thematic ground as His (2020) in its depiction of small-town queerness and its exploration of what constitutes a family - but which also explores alternative kinship ties in more depth; and which resonates with So Long, See You Tomorrow (2021)'s observation of the sacrifices involved in self-exile as a mode of escape. But this quiet drama has a more brutal representation of homophobia and its consequences, a bleaker tone, and a more artistically-distinctive execution.
Classicist and animist.
Recommended reviews/analysis:
7. The Handmaiden

Korean Movie - 2016

9.5
This stunningly polished and stylish revenge thriller (and occasional dark comedy) retells (from the perspective of the two queer women leading this show) the story of how they overturned and escaped from heteropatriarchal and colonial masculinity and sexual abuse by subverting their compromised social positions in 1930s colonized Korea & Japan. There is controversy over the sexual politics of the erotic lesbian sex scenes as grounded in [hetero] male fantasy + gaze, and those scenes weren't enjoyable for me, a Known Gay (though there were moments that my gayze was drawn to Count Fujiwara, pls don't at me); however, I believe the film critically questions [attentive] viewers about the always-already compromised context of the lesbian sex scenes by drawing attention to the characters' deliberate performance/appropriation of these tropes (in a way that is similar to how drag artists perform gender via queerly excessive mimicry of viewers' expectations about how gender works).
Animist and classicist.
Recommended reviews/analysis:
8. Monster

Japanese Movie - 2023

9.5
9. Moonlit Winter

Korean Movie - 2019

9.0
10. Egoist

Japanese Movie - 2022

9.0
11. Funeral Parade of Roses

Japanese Movie - 1969

9.0
12. The Wedding Banquet

Taiwanese Movie - 1993

9.0