The 30 greatest LGBTQ films ever, ranked

Austerely shot in black and white, The Terence Davies Trilogy is built from three short films, largely made while Davies was at film school, depicting three stages of the life of a repressed gay man. As it flicks through his memories, the film emerges as one of the most unrelentingly bleak in the Liverpool-born director's uncheery canon.

The 'B' in LGBT still goes largely ignored by Hollywood, but way back in 1971 John Schlesinger struck a blow against bisexual erasure with the very British Sunday Bloody Sunday. Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch both find themselves strung along by that handsome but emotionally unavailable rake Murray Head and everyone is terribly, terribly sensible about it.

One of the most quotable movies of all time, this legendary documentary tells the story of the gay and transgender stars of 1980s New York City's ball culture. At turns hilarious and heartbreakingly tragic, Paris Is Burning is as much about race, class, gender and poverty as it is sexuality. Fans of RuPaul's Drag Race will suddenly realise where "shade" and "realness" really came from.

This documentary is one of the biggest sources of inspiration for RuPaul's Drag Race.

Can't have a top 30 LGBT list without a bit of Derek Jarman, right? Caravaggio gleefully upends notions of Renaissance propriety as Jarman shows us a bisexual street hustler who gained the ear of the Vatican and sublimated his desires into a profoundly sensual and enduring body of art. With the benefit of Hot Young Sean Bean.

Many will remember Moonlight because of its historical Oscars moment in 2017 (when the movie won Best Picture after La La Land had been wrongly announced as the winner), but there is so much more to Barry Jenkins' astounding directorial debut. Based on the unpublished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the story follows a young Black man through three key moments of his life, as he deals with family issues, poverty and his attraction to men.

Jamie Babbit's debut has become a camp queer classic, and it's still as hilarious and groundbreaking as it was when it was first released. Russian Doll's Natasha Lyonne plays a teenager who is sent to a conversion therapy camp after her parents realise she might be a lesbian. Their strategy backfires, though, as the teen will get to explore her queerness further. The cast includes Clea DuVall, Melanie Lynskey, and RuPaul Charles. But I'm a Cheerleader is a truly genius and funny satirical teen romantic comedy.

The best of Gregg Araki's cult hits exploring teenage sexuality. This one's a dark tale of two young boys who are abused by their little league coach. A decade later they're struggling to deal with the trauma in different ways, one as a prostitute, the other believing he was abducted by aliens. Features career-making performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet.

Four years before Robin Campillo scooped the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes with AIDS activism drama 120 Beats Per Minute (2017), the French filmmaker broke through with this peculiarly gripping tale of a bourgeois Parisian man entangled in the life of a Ukrainian rent boy and his macho, controlling pimp.

Winner of four César awards in 1995, André Techiné's most fully-achieved feature to date is a coming-of-age tale set in south-west France in 1962 in the dying days of the Algerian War. Stéphane Rideau, who went on to beautify gay-themed films such as Full Speed, Come Undone and François Ozon's Sitcom, makes his arresting debut.

Shot by the self -styled "Most Important Director In New German Cinema" Rainer Werner Fassbinder, it was called "The Right Fist of Freedom" in Germany and "Might Makes Right" in France – a clearer indication that notions of power within sex were foremost in Fassbinder's mind. Fassbinder himself stars as Fox, a barely literate lottery winner exploited by his upper-class boyfriend in a dispiriting tale of exploitation and lovelessness in '70s West Germany.

Frank and affecting, All Over Me sees New York through the eyes of Claude (Alison Folland), a teenage lesbian in love with her best friend, the unreliable and sexually confused Ellen (Tara Subkoff). Not just a teen-awakening story, it's also a great document of the '90s Riot Grrl music scene, with a kick-ass soundtrack.

The film that brought the Wachowskis to the world's attention, it's a stylish, sexy thriller, taut as piano wire, that embraces the very noir clichés it subverts, casting Gina Gershon as a butch-ish handywoman who desperately hopes she can trust femme fatale Jennifer Tilly as they scheme to rip off the glamorous dame's mobster boyfriend.

This Cannes 2011 Queer Palm winner sees a closeted middle-aged Afrikaans husband and father unravelling under the infatuating spell of his friend's handsome son. An orgy with several fellow closeted South African men surely ranks as one of the most surprising – and least physically prepossessing – gay sex scenes in cinema history.

Before the beautiful Ammonite, director Francis Lee delivered one of the greatest LGTBQ+ movies of all time back in 2017. Reminiscent of Brokeback Mountain, God's Own Country is an intense love story and coming-of-age tale starring The Crown's Josh O'Connor and Alec Secăreanu. The story follows a young sheep farmer in Yorkshire whose life is transformed by the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker.

The original Swedish title F**king Åmål appropriately suggests the rage beneath the surface of this delicate teenage love story, between popular, extrovert Elin and ostracised Agnes in the rural Swedish town of Åmål, which also serves as a fable about smalltown thinking everywhere.

With a top-notch cast including Ewan McGregor, Christian Bale and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Todd Haynes' heady revision of the Glam Rock era of Bowie, Bolan and Roxy Music sees a gay British journalist find out about the life of bisexual rock star Brian Slade and, through his influence, gain the strength to come out.

Céline Sciamma's charming and affectionate coming-of-age drama follows 10-year-old tomboy Laure/Mikhael (a terrific Zoé Héran) as she experiments with her gender identity when her family moves to a new neighbourhood.

This honest and heartbreaking 1993 documentary centres on the final months of a relationship between two dying gay men and the challenges presented by AIDS.