Maurice (1987) Hugh Grant

The director Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant were romantic partners as well as professional ones, though their films rarely reflected their sexuality in anything more than an oblique sense. Many of their greatest films evoke a sense of unspoken desire, of any persuasion, simmering beneath a placid surface of decorum – a repression with which many a gay person, unable always to freely articulate their romantic self, has been able to empathise.

Maurice, in a sense, was the duo’s cinematic coming-out: the story of a young man growing into his homosexuality in politely hostile English society, it’s a film that exquisitely queers the stiff-upper-lip emotions so central to the Merchant Ivory oeuvre.