15 Essential Movies For LGBT* Pride Month

Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette is a film about crossing boundaries in more than one sense: set during the Thatcher era, it works as a commentary on the racial, class and sexual divisions of 1980s London and illustrates how seemingly simple categories and identities become blurred by the complexity of life itself.

Daniel Day-Lewis stars as punk Johnny, who reunites with his childhood friend Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a young Pakistani man struggling to break free from familial obligations. Together they set to work rebuilding the titular laundrette, as their friendship evolves into something more at odds with the expectations of the people and society around them. A revolutionary movie at the time of its release for the depiction of the gay relationship between Johnny and Omar, it's also a showpiece for the early phase of Day-Lewis's illustrious acting career.

Frears and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (who also wrote the excellent novels The Buddha Of Suburbia and Intimacy, the latter of which was adapted to the screen by Patrice Chéreau), handle the complex social and culture interplay with deft assurance, and My Beautiful Laundrette is now widely considered among the most important British films of the 1980s.