Which queer films are the best of the best?
In honor of Pride Month, film and TV review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has released its yearly list of the top 200 best LGBTQ+ films of all time, and it is chock-full of excellent queer films that stand the test of time and span almost the past 100 years!
With titles like Love, Simon and Paris Is Burning to Tangerine and Brokeback Mountain, the list has a wide range of genres and moods, but they all have something in common: they all "prominently feature gay, lesbian, trans, or queer characters; concern itself centrally with LGBTQ+ themes; present its LGBTQ+ characters in a fair and realistic light; and/or be seen as a touchpoint in the evolution of queer cinema." And perhaps most importantly, they have to be certified fresh on RT's Tomatometer.
"The final list was culled from a longlist of hundreds, after which the films were ranked according to the Adjusted Tomatometer, which acts as a kind of inflation adjustment, taking into consideration the Tomatometer score, as well as the number of reviews a film received relative to the average number of reviews for films released that same year, " RT said about their process.
"All of these films stand on the shoulders of other LGBTQ+ films that have come before. Our list of the 200 Best LGBTQ+ Movies of All Time stretches back 90 years to the pioneering German film, Madchen in Uniform, which was subsequently banned by the Nazis, and crosses multiple continents, cultures, and genres. There are broad American comedies (The Birdcage), artful Korean crime dramas (The Handmaiden), groundbreaking indies (Tangerine), and landmark documentaries (Paris Is Burning). In our latest thorough update to the list, we added titles like the documentary Welcome to Chechnya, about LGBTQ+ activists risking their lives for the cause in Russia; Certified Fresh comedy Shiva, Baby; and Netflix's The Old Guard, a rare movie about super beings that showed a same-sex relationship between two of its heroes."
Scroll through the top 10 below and make sure to check out Rotten Tomatoes' website for the full list!
