The 10 Best Lesbian Movies

Produced at the height of Weimar Germany’s decadence and progressive social attitudes—and on the eve of the Nazi Reich—this is a remarkably well acted and beautifully observed story of a young girl’s powerful romantic crush on her teacher, a striking woman at an all girls’ Catholic school.

If you’ve ever wondered how Catherine Deneuve became a lesbian icon, this is the movie to watch. She plays a powerful vampire who seduces those who tempt her, then discards them to suffer eternal withering. David Bowie plays her husband, now estranged, but Susan Sarandon, as a physician-scientist studying how blood affects aging, is her object of lust—and bloodlust— sans égale! Directed with sheer fabulousness by the late Tony Scott.

When a young Olympic-training track athlete (Mariel Hemingway) teeters between the affections of a lesbian teammate (Patrice Donnelly) and a male coach (Scott Glenn), you know this has to be a just-out-of-the-’70s not-quite-liberated universe. But filmmaker Robert Towne, coming off of his Oscar for writing Chinatown, knows how to tell a good yarn and directs beautiful, naturalistic performances.

This exquisite British coming-of-age story about a doomed summer fling between working-class Mona (tomboyish but lovely Nathalie Press) and the posh, gorgeous Tamsin (a young, then-unknown Emily Blunt) packs some serious pathos into its shimmering visuals.

A married suburban lesbian New Jersey soccer mom, embodied with commanding physical grace by Robin Weigert (who played, unrecognizably, Calamity Jane in HBO's Deadwood) gets an apartment in downtown Manhattan and turns tricks as a high-priced call girl. This shrewd, darkly comic fable is a thoroughly riveting indie that’s very, very good in bed.

Sometimes love is best seen close-up. That’s how it is with the relationship at the heart of this epic romance, between a beautiful Parisian art student (Léa Seydoux) and the fresh-faced high-school girl (Adèle Exarchopoulos) who falls for her madly.

English professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) arrives in Nevada to get a divorce, and stays at a ranch. It’s the 1950s, but what happens between Vivian and the rancher’s daughter, Cay Rivers (Patricia Charbonneau), as intense and uncompromisingly passionate as it is, can only be fully appreciated from a post-liberated point of view. A timeless love story.

A clever, hip, and thoroughly stylish crime drama in which the protagonists, played by Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon, are lovers and stealthy thieves. As written and directed by Matrix creators Andy and Lana Wachowski—then the Wachowski Brothers—Tilly and Gershon are arguably the sexiest pair of outlaws to ever grace the screen. They turn the conventions of film noir (strong women manipulating smitten men) upside down.

Ally Sheedy, barely seen since her Breakfast Club days, made a splashy comeback with this achingly moving drama about a New York lesbian artist—a high art photographer and a heroin addict—who lives with her funky lover (Patricia Clarkson) upstairs from a young straight couple (beautiful Radha Mitchell and Gabriel Mann). Sheedy and Mitchell fall in love: tragically, tenderly, and spectacularly. The brilliant directorial debut of Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right).

Based on book by Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley) written under a pseudonym, directed by Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), and starring a sultry Cate Blanchett as a married woman and an obsessed Rooney Mara as a younger working girl, Carol is a look back to a time (New York in the 1950s) when lesbian lust and romance where hidden and often crushed by social pressures. But it’s also an expression of love's inevitability, and an award-worthy triumph of the art of filmmaking.