One of the most spectacular epics of all time, even by the standards of Hollywood, the famous twenty minute chariot race alone took three months to shoot, and, along the way, Ben is given a helping hand and converted by Jesus. An unmissable slice of movie history. Won Best Picture at 1959 Academy Awards. find out more...

Harold Pinter's debut as a film director sees Alan Bates reprise his role as Ben Butley, a university don, as he struggles to stay on top of his increasingly chaotic career. The film portrays Butley's anxieties as a teacher no longer convinced that his role in life is worthwhile, with his passion for the profession falling victim to cynicism and a moral malaise. The film's strength lies in its dialogue, with the vicious banter between warring academics showing their intelligence, and the frustra find out more...

The beautiful Venice waterfront scenery and frustated emotions abound in this cinema classic from Thomas Mann's novel. Dirk Bogarde is an ageing gay man who fantasises whistfully about a young boy who is in the same hotel on the Lido. A revealing tale as much about old age grieving for lost youth as it is about obsession and homosexuality. find out more...

Cross-dressing club-kid Eddie vies with a rival drag-queen for the favours of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda in this unflinching and often brutal portrayal of Japanese gay subculture. Matsumoto achieves a line between pathos and hilarity that makes Funeral Parade of Roses utterly unique; a feverish collision of avant-garde aesthetics and grind-house shocks (not to mention a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange). In addition this psychedelic era film is a gay play on the O find out more...

As an intellectual challenge, two young students strangle their "inferior" classmate, hide his body in their apartment, and invite his friends and family to a dinner party as a means to test the "perfection" of their crime. In attendance are Mr. Henry Kentley and Mrs. Anita Atwater, the victim's father and aunt; Kenneth Turner, the victim's love rival and the deceased's fiancée. The guest of honour is the student's former lecturer whose flippant repartee regarding social caste has been interpret find out more...

In first century Rome, two student friends, Encolpio and Ascilto, argue about ownership of the boy Gitone, divide their belongings and split up. The boy, allowed to choose who he goes with, chooses Ascilto. Only a sudden earthquake saves Encolpio from suicide. We follow Encolpio through a series of adventures, where he is eventually reunited with Ascilto, and which culminates in them helping a man kidnap a hermaphrodite demi-god from a temple. The god dies, and as punishment Encolpio becomes imp find out more...

Based on a Tennessee Williams play and touching on all manner of depraved horrors. Taylor plays the girl driven to madness by what she's witnessed and Clift is the shrink being pressured to lobotomise her, but Hepburn steals the show as the unnervingly genteel aunt trying to sweep everything under the carpet. find out more...

Absorbing, atmospheric portrayal of a suave, decadent man's decline and fall when his man-servant wreaks subtle havoc from below the stairs. Class-warfare at its unsettling and British best! find out more...

Jean Genet's only film (later disowned by Genet), Un chant d'amour (1950) was banned from public exhibition in France upon its initial release, and has won only sporadic screenings since, often in censored form. It is semi-pornographic, featuring full-frontal male nudes playing with their hard-ons, and fetishistic close-ups of sweaty feet, armpits and thighs. Tough watching it is but its influence can be found in most of the more stylised examples of gay culture everywhere, from perfume adverts find out more...

The police are after Jack Barrett, he has stolen £2,300 from the building construction firm that employs him as a wages clerk in an attempt to pay off his blackmailers. While on the run Jack tries desperately to get in touch with Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde), a prosperous young barrister, but he is caught before they can meet. In his panic and despair Jack commits suicide while in custody, but Farr is now hopelessly involved and realizing the exposure of his earlier life is inevitable he decid find out more...