In Claire Denis’ remake of Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, glances and gestures speak more than words, combat training regimens become tightly choreographed and sensual dances. Modern adaptations and analyses of the tale—featuring a young attractive sailor admired by his crewmates but persecuted by his superior—have focused on its homosexual undercurrents. Denis’ sensualizing of the rituals of combat training and her concentration on the all-consuming emotional state of the narrator, played by the ever-gruff and acrobatic Denis Lavant, place it in this lineage as well as in the broader 90s flourishing of queer cinema. The heart of this film is a forbidden sentiment, in this case, the burning resentment of Galoup, the narrator, against Sentain, the handsome and affable newcomer. Galoup resents Sentain’s purity of spirit, remarking that nothing drove him into the Foreign Legion (apparently a haven for outcasts from around the world, rag-tag ramblers with troubled pasts, often criminal, often sexually deviant). Regardless of the characters’ feelings for one another, the camera has a distinctly desiring gaze of the beautiful male figures, reminding us of the tension between the taboo of homosexual desire and a military culture in which loving comradery, solidarity and intense physicality awkwardly mix. – Aidin Kamali

Like Beau Travail, Brief Encounter frames its story through the protagonist’s narration of a tabooed desire, in this case, a brush with marital infidelity. Played by Celia Johnson, Laura narrates her falling into love with an affable doctor, Trevor Howard’s Alec; they are both married with children. Director David Lean’s legend was made in the late 50s and 60s with sprawling epics—The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago—but his first four films, including this one, were products of his collaboration with a mentor who ushered him into the director’s chair, playwright Noël Coward (who has a brief cameo). In under an hour and a half and with a small cast of characters, Lean expertly weaves the gut-punch emotions of melodrama into a gripping character study amidst forbidden love.

Turning eighty this year, the film seen today feels like an almost-too-perfect model for mid-20th century English middle-class repressed romance. Although David Lean, married six times and often a renegade in film form and in life, might have wanted to push the envelope a bit, Coward, who was privately gay and never drastically threatened public sensibilities, kept this film respectfully restrained for audiences rebuilding their lives, families and country after six years of brutal warfare. – Aidin Kamali