Michael Koresky

William Wyler, USA, 1936; The Criterion Collection, DVD & Blu-Ray

Primal scream: Flaming Creatures, Jack Smith’s spectacle of intense queer desire, is one of the most beautiful of all experimental films

Brief encounter: Andy Milligan’s Vapors radiates passion, spontaneity, and a genuine drive that are unfakeable

Masked man: in All That Heaven Allows Rock Hudson’s masculinity is untortured, undeniable, and unperturbed by matters of self-identity

Sacred and profane: Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando is dogged in its refusal to fit easy categories

As films and film culture face brutal and witless change, love of the art form can be radical and sustaining

Unmasked: from its opening scene, João Pedro Rodrigues’s O Fantasma might as well be screaming “I’m gay!”

Fabulous fascists: that there have been more gay Nazis than gay victims of Nazis on-screen is evidence of our culture’s entrenched homophobia

Beneath the surface: Everyone in Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies just wants to be adored

Big deal: Patsy Kelly was a brash delight whose unapologetic openness about her life would be a persistent problem with studio gatekeepers

It’s a jungle out there: in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, love is transformative

Bah, humbug: in the many versions of A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Past has rarely been portrayed as a properly gender-less character

J'accuse!: William Wyler’s These Three is a fascinating, recalibrated tale with traces of the queer themes of its source material

Table manners: the inspirations behind the sumptuous documentary-fiction hybrid from Koresky, Jeff Reichert, and Farihah Zaman

Close to you: Todd Haynes’s Superstar uses disease as cover for a social rot so entrenched there may be no cure

Bang bang: Fassbinder’s debut, Love Is Colder Than Death, is a genuinely fluid depiction of identity, sex, and love that reflected the director’s own matter-of-fact bisexuality

Out of the shadows: The Uninvited’s phantom lesbianism is exhilarating in making its subtext almost visible

What’s your pleasure? Clive Barker’s Hellraiser couples S&M with a heavy dose of homoeroticism that makes it an unapologetic violation of heteronormative standards

Over the rainbow: The Harvey Girls offers a quintessential example of the complex Judy Garland persona, embodying her movie star effervescence yet pointing toward darker roads

Love on the rocks: a report from TIFF on Marriage Story, Two of Us, Africa, and others