Lesbian Visibility Week: 9 films about queer women that changed the world

1) Carol

Nominated for six Oscars and recouping its $11.8m budget four times over, moody romance Carol felt like a cultural awakening at the time of its release. Arriving to great fanfare in the festive season of 2015 (we’ll take this over Die Hard as a Christmas movie, thanks), it proved a feverish talking point reminiscent of Brokeback Mountain a decade before.

Cate Blanchett is reliably polished as the titular character: an impossibly elegant high society lady in 1950s New York, who embarks on a secret affair with the younger Therese, an aspiring photographer played Rooney Mara. The passion is swooning and the stakes are high, but the film operates in a surprisingly gentle key for an indie blockbuster, with the chemistry between the leads movingly sweet.

2) Tár

Cate drew comparisons between Carol and Tár – the latter an exacting examination of a conductor caught up in the MeToo movement who just so happens to be in a relationship with a woman – in a 2023 interview with Attitude. “What I love about the story that Todd [Field, Tár‘s writer and director] has wrought, and the way he’s directed it and the way we approached it, their same-sex relationship just was,” she said. “It’s not the subject matter of the film. Nor is the characters’ gender. It’s a meditation on power.”

“But of course, the landscape has changed enormously since we made Carol,” she added. “When we made that, there were so few films moving over into the mainstream that dealt with same-sex relationships. And also picking it apart, so it’s not a monolithic experience. Tár could only have been made now. It couldn’t have been made and viewed in a mainstream audience 20 years ago. Therefore, we’re able to talk about a whole lot more than simply their relationship.”

3) Mulholland Drive

Helmed by late director extraordinaire David Lynch, mystery noir Mulholland Drive (2001) is a long, intellectually challenging experience, rewarding close attention (and endless secondary reading!) with cinematic kryptonite: a story that lives on in the mind, folding in on itself into infinity. No wonder it was named the best film of the 21st century in a BBC Culture poll of 177 international film critics.

Naomi Watts channels Aimee Lou Wood in The White Lotus vibes as the absurdly cute Betty, who moves to LA to pursue her dream of becoming an actress, but whose life is changed forever after a chance encounter with an amnesic femme fatale Rita (a smouldering Laura Harring). A lot is made of ‘incidental queerness’ – when LGBTQ representation is just one layer of the story, rather than the main point of it – and in this spirit, Lynch was ahead of the curve. And while there’s much to love about the film’s weird and wonderful tone, its real power lies ultimately in Watts’ deeply human depiction of a young woman ground down by a sense of failure.

4)The Hours

Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep – has a movie ever featured a more formidable trio of acting talent than this one? And get this – they’re never on-screen together, bar one moment towards the end!

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham, the film follows three queer women (one of them literary icon Virginia Woolf) busy hosting something – family get-togethers; a party – but thoroughly distracted by mental health emergencies, as per Woolf’s most famous character and novel, Mrs Dalloway.

Late last year, Nicole chatted with Attitude about 2024’s Babygirl, which again features a fully-realised queer character in Isabel, Nicole character Romy’s on-screen daughter. “I make my artistic choices knowing what I’m doing,” the Oscar-winner told us.

5) Drift

Cynthia Erivo gave rage wings as Elphaba in Wicked (which we’re half tempted to include in this round-up!) — but in Drift, she sinks into something far quieter. As Jaqueline, a Liberian refugee stranded on a Greek island, she delivers a performance hollowed by grief, each movement pared back to its essence. Her queerness is incidental; her humanity, undeniable. Alia Shawkat matches her restraint, gently softening her usual spark as Jaqueline’s tender, unassuming love interest.

As Cynthia told Attitude of the film in 2024: “I haven’t read the source novel, but I read this piece, and that is what I saw, that felt right. That’s what I love about [the queerness]: it was incidental. It’s just part of who she is. And it’s not up for discussion or debate. It is what it is. I felt really proud of that.”

6) Disobedience

A restrained character study following a forbidden love affair between two women in London’s Orthodox Jewish, this 2017 critical darling stars Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. (This character couldn’t be more the polar opposite of Mean Girls‘ Regina George if she tried!)

The film is helmed by Sebastian Lelio, whose previous effort — the amazing A Fantastic Woman, about a Santiago-based trans woman — was awarded the 2018 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

7) Love Lies Bleeding

Attitude awarded this Kristen Stewart showstopper five stars out of five at last year’s BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. Here’s an excerpt from our review. “Director Rose Glass is a master of atmosphere. Her last film, the bananas religious-themed horror Saint Maud (2020), framed the seaside town of Scarborough as hell’s waiting room. Here, the desert town of Albuquerque, New Mexico is a tempting oasis of neon-lit vice, populated with surly, morally ambiguous characters whose desires fill the starlit sky. 

“Kristen Stewart is Lou, a discontented gym manager energised by the arrival of drifting dom top bodybuilder Jackie – Katy M. O’Brian, serving pure life force. The two delve into steroid use, and everything gets pulpier: their relationship, their bodies, and the film itself. They sink to tragic places, with Jackie in particular winding up a monstrous mess of ambition, and still, you root for them.”

8) Bound

In the latest issue of Attitude, film critic Guy Lodge retrospectively reviews this under-discussed 1996 classic, reflecting on how “long before sibling directing duo the Wachowskis became sisters, they made the most flagrantly queer film of their career with this deliciously tongue-in-cheek but sincerely sexy erotic noir. Each in the best form of their careers, Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly star as underworld lovers — an ex-con and a restless gangster’s moll, respectively — plotting to flee the mob with a big wad of Mafia money to boot. It’s tightly plotted and dizzily hot, fully immersed in mid-Nineties style but fresh as a daisy today: anyone who saw and loved Love Lies Bleeding last year but hasn’t seen this, get on it.”

9) The Handmaiden

It was arresting 2016 psychological thriller The Handmaiden, long before Squid Game and BLACKPINK, that made this writer sit up and take notice of the compelling pop culture coming out of South Korea, and the scale of its ambition. This critical hit from Decision to Leave director Park Chan-wook feels like all-out riposte to decades of LGBTQ women being insultingly underserved in TV and film: a two-hour, 31-minute epic, turbocharged with a glossily-executed £6m+ budget, that exalts its glorious lesbian characters to positions of cinematic royalty.

The storyline follows the likeably scrappy pickpocket Sook-hee hired by a con man to serve as handmaiden to Japanese heiress Lady Hideko. Sapphic passion on satin sheets ensues, thwarting Count Fujiwara’s fiendish plan. A visually sumptuous rollercoaster of breathtaking ambition, this is one of the best films of the century.