“Why do people not just do this all the time?”
That incredulous question comes from Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter midway through Poor Things, following a vigorous introductory bout of copulation with Mark Ruffalo’s caddish lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ imaginative riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein charts a deceased Victorian woman’s reanimation with the brain of an infant, allowing her to reject the rules of a patriarchal society as she develops and acquires knowledge. Among the taboos she gleefully shatters is the notion that respectable women must display a decorously prim attitude toward sex.
Bella can’t get enough of what she calls “furious jumping.” Discovering masturbation before she knows the word for it, she describes the experience as “working on myself to get happiness.” You go, girl.
Such joyful sex-positivity in movies has been on the decline of late. Recall the rare bestowal by the MPA earlier this year of an NC-17 rating on Ira Sachs’ Passages over a torrid session between Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw that was entirely integral to character and plot. Witness the online emergence of delicate Gen Z flowers calling for the removal of sex and nudity from movies.
We’re a long way from the more relaxed attitude toward sex and sensuality in the New Hollywood of the 1970s, when Faye Dunaway’s Katie Elder in the 1971 Western Doc responded to the suggestion that she should get herself off to church by saying, “When I’m on my knees, it ain’t in prayer.” (Likewise, from the gloriously tawdry heyday of the erotic thriller in the 1980s and ’90s, when the femme fatale played by Linda Fiorentino in the neo-noir The Last Seduction swaggered into a bar inquiring, “Who’s a girl gotta suck around here to get a drink?”)
The following 20-title list is an entirely subjective rundown of personal favorites that made me sit up and pay attention on a first viewing, in most cases decades ago. The titles and the order they appear in could be completely different a month from now. I’m not claiming these are the sexiest films in Hollywood — or Hollywood-adjacent — history. But all of them earned their place in the sensuality annals, whether with unapologetic raunch, the power of steamy suggestion or even just one smoking hot, lingering kiss
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‘Notorious’ (1946)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Few films got around Hays Code censorship with the heat that Hitchcock brought to the absolute barn-burner of a kiss between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant — one of the all-time great movie smooches — in his romantic noir about spies infiltrating a ring of Nazis in Brazil. Finding a crack in the three-second-maximum ruling, the director had his actors break off multiple times during their two and a half minutes of locking lips, punctuating the scene with dialogue, nuzzling, a head resting on a shoulder, even a phone call. Bergman’s Alicia talks about “a chicken in the icebox” and “a nice bottle of wine,” but the appetite these two have for each other is all that matters.
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‘Unfaithful’ (2002)
Image Credit: 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Adrian Lyne is all over most erotic film lists — take your pick from 9½ Weeks (who’s gonna clean up that kitchen?), Fatal Attraction (“I’m not going to be ignored, Dan”) or Indecent Proposal (a million-buck fuck should at least be interesting), just please let’s forget the director’s turgid 2022 comeback, Deep Water. Top of the line Lyne for me is this almost elegant thriller about infidelity, guilt and rage. That’s largely because Diane Lane can class up any joint, and she elevates this familiar genre piece way above its standard trappings. Also because her sex scenes with Olivier Martinez are on fire, leaving little doubt about why her character would have strayed outside her marriage to predictable Richard Gere.
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‘Thelma & Louise’ (1991)
Image Credit: Courtesy of MGM/Photofest When Brad Pitt, as shady cowboy drifter J.D., sidled up to Geena Davis’ Thelma in a parked Ford Thunderbird in Ridley Scott’s tragicomic feminist road movie, a star was born. Oozing breezily confident sexual magnetism beneath his aww-shucks attitude and down-home drawl, J.D. talks his way into Thelma’s motel room and the next morning proceeds to steal the life savings of her best friend Louise (Susan Sarandon), funds that the two fugitives need to flee to Mexico. As one-night stands go, it’s a disaster. But Thelma at least gets a shot of romantic adventure unlike anything she’s experienced with the infantile jerk she married, plus some tips on robbery that soon come in handy.
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‘Little Children’ (2006)
Image Credit: New Line Cinema/courtesy Everett Collection At the center of Todd Field’s unsettling, darkly satirical peek beneath the tidy surfaces of American suburbia are the hungry extramarital trysts between Kate Winslet’s earthy, lustful Sarah and Patrick Wilson’s Brad (whose warm caramel skin tones should be against the law), while their spouses are off at work. Infidelity, of course, is nothing new in movies, but the sexual rebirth of a disappointed housewife while perched on a washing machine gave a whole new meaning to the spin cycle.
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‘Double Indemnity’ (1944)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Barbara Stanwyck is trouble. You know that from the first time Fred MacMurray’s Los Angeles insurance agent, Walter Neff, sees her semi-clad character, Phyllis Dietrichson, upstairs during a house call, shooting him a look that reels him in without a word. He never stands a chance of coming away unscarred. Billy Wilder’s film of the James M. Cain novel is canonical noir, tracing Phyllis’ plan to murder her husband and cash in on an accidental death claim. But the crime elements wouldn’t be half as potent without the spell of sexual intoxication she casts over Walter, conveyed entirely through mood and innuendo.
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‘Moonlight’ (2016)
Image Credit: David Bornfriend, ©A24/courtesy Everett Collection Barry Jenkins’ transfixing portrait of three formative periods in the life of a Black gay man growing up in Miami’s poor Liberty City neighborhood during the 1980s crack epidemic is a nuanced exploration of identity struggle that unfolds like a melancholy mood piece. But just like the ocean breeze that blows in on a warm evening, it’s alive with the sensual vitality of self-discovery and romantic yearning. The young protagonist’s first sexual experience on a beach at night is a scene of aching intimacy, and although his encounter years later with that same adolescent first love stops well short of seduction, when the 1963 Barbara Lewis doo-wop hit “Hello Stranger” comes on the jukebox, you will melt.
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‘Mississippi Masala’ (1991)
Image Credit: Samuel Goldwyn Films/Courtesy Everett Collection As in the majority of these entries, chemistry is key, and Sarita Choudhury and Denzel Washington had it to spare in Mira Nair’s buoyant account of an interracial romance between a Ugandan Indian immigrant and a Black Mississippian, facing disapproval from both their communities. A fresh, often humorous look at cultural dislocation and a depiction of love across the brown-Black axis that was radical for its time, the movie features an especially memorable nighttime telephone conversation so scorchingly sexy and suffused with physical longing it will make you nostalgic for the pre-FaceTime landline days.
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‘Bull Durham’ (1988)
Image Credit: Orion Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon were at their most magnetic here, and together, they’re combustible. Ron Shelton’s sexy, grown-up comedy romance is the kind of movie that seldom gets made anymore, its deep affection for America’s national pastime matched by its playful mapping of the path from flirtation to unbridled passion, and perhaps, to something more lasting. Sarandon plays Annie Savoy, a groupie who takes one new player per season from the minor-league Durham Bulls under her wing to impart the poetry of baseball. She settles on Tim Robbins’ brash pitcher, nicknamed “Nuke,” but Costner’s veteran catcher, Crash Davis, turns it into a three-way contest. The sex literally makes the furniture shake. It helps that Crash not only has a nimble touch when unsnapping a garter belt, he can also paint a woman’s toenails.
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‘Shampoo’ (1975)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Warren Beatty’s tabloid reputation as a Hollywood lothario was so widespread in the ’70s that MAD magazine once jokingly wondered why he hadn’t slept with Shirley MacLaine. (They’re brother and sister, kids.) Nowhere was his alleged prowess with women more knowingly exploited than in Hal Ashby’s rollicking satire of sexual politics — and by extension, regular politics — in Nixon-era America. In a project he tailored for himself, Beatty plays a horny Los Angeles hairdresser who wields his blow dryer like an extra penis, wending his way through the bedrooms of Beverly Hills while seeking to bankroll his own salon. Even sleeping with the wife (Lee Grant), mistress (Julie Christie) and 17-year-old daughter (Carrie Fisher) of a potential investor (Jack Warden) doesn’t appear to forestall that dream.
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‘Hud’ (1963)
Image Credit: 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett Collection Paul Newman was never more beautiful than in the late ’50s and early ’60s, so any number of his roles from that period came loaded with an erotic charge — the alcoholic former high school athlete in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the pool hall shark in The Hustler, the gigolo in Sweet Bird of Youth. But the actor’s raw sexuality was never on more prodigious display than in Martin Ritt’s drama about an arrogant Texas cattleman, insensitive to the needs of everyone around him. An attempted rape scene deepens the character’s antihero status, but seldom has male beauty been more vividly appreciated than when Patricia Neal’s jaded housekeeper Alma tells him: “You look pretty good without your shirt on, you know. Sight of that through the kitchen window made me put down my dish towel more’n once.”
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‘High Art’ (1998)
Image Credit: October Films/courtesy Everett Collection Lisa Cholodenko’s head-turning debut rescued Ally Sheedy from Breakfast Club Brat Pack semi-obscurity, allowing her to show a previously untapped range as Lucy, an edgy, once-famous photographer inspired by Nan Goldin. A heated triangulation forms with her heroin-addicted, former Fassbinder-muse girlfriend Greta (Patricia Clarkson, all languid glamour gone to seed) and their downstairs neighbor, ambitious art magazine assistant editor Syd (Radha Mitchell), who drifts away from her boyfriend and into Lucy’s bed. The love scenes are often lauded as a breakthrough in mainstream lesbian screen representation, but Cholodenko is as alert to the psychic and emotional landscape as the sexuality. The depiction of the druggy downtown New York demi-monde evokes Goldin’s landmark first collection, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
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‘The Paperboy’ (2012)
Image Credit: Millennium Entertainment /Courtesy Everett Collection Lee Daniels’ third feature drew derision when it premiered in Cannes. But seen outside that art-house hothouse, it’s a fabulously overripe slice of Florida swamp pulp that lets Nicole Kidman go full Sharon Stone, seemingly taking style tips from the cover of Dusty in Memphis. Her masturbatory display tantalizing John Cusack’s handcuffed alligator-hunting redneck — he’s locked up for murder — is one for the ages. Even wilder is her waving off some young women on a beach attempting to neutralize the jellyfish stings covering Zac Efron’s body by urinating on him. “Move it! If anyone’s gonna piss on him it’s gonna be me!” Daniels delighted the audience at his Cannes press conference by justifying the film’s eroticization of Efron’s character in his tighty-whities: “The camera can’t help but love him. And I’m gay. What do you want?”
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‘Wild Things’ (1998)
Image Credit: Columbia Pictures/courtesy Everett Co / Everett Collection When John McNaughton’s mystery thriller was released during the last gasp of ’90s salaciousness, word went out instantly that its softcore titillation included a rare sighting of what gay fans waggishly called “Kevin Bacon’s bacon.” But that full-frontal moment aside, this is deluxe trash, with a plot so contorted they’re still busy elucidating over the end credits. Matt Dillon plays a high-school guidance counselor accused of rape by two students (Denise Richards and Neve Campbell). But wait, it’s a scam! That’s just the start of a twisty series of double-crosses, murders and a swimming pool catfight that turns into a lesbian make-out session, all of it observed with prurient attention by Bacon’s Miami detective.
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‘Call Me By Your Name’ (2017)
Image Credit: Sony Pictures Classics /Courtesy Everett Collection Long before Bella Baxter was exploring the masturbatory pleasures of the fruit bowl in Poor Things, Luca Guadagnino’s ravishing evocation of first love and sexual awakening demonstrated the succulent possibilities of a ripe peach. The intimacy between Timothée Chalamet’s 17-year-old Elio and his father’s grad student assistant, played by Armie Hammer, is more often suggested than shown. But that doesn’t make it any less palpable, desire infusing the air between them like the golden rays of the Italian summer sun. This was the movie that launched a thousand Chalamemes, notably one in which Elio weaves his way onto a dance floor to The Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” his sinuous moves suggesting an incipient mating ritual.
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‘The Big Easy’ (1986)
Image Credit: Columbia Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection The films of the ’80s and ’90s that often come up in the erotica conversation tend to be those in which sex is equated with danger, many of them — Jade, Sliver, Showgirls — also penned by Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. But director Jim McBride started from the ground up, conjuring the sultry atmosphere of New Orleans with a dose of Cajun seasoning and then spinning a taut thriller about police corruption in which the real heat comes from the tense, smoldering relationship between a state D.A. and a local cop caught up in her investigation, played with off-the-charts chemistry by Ellen Barkin and Dennis Quaid.
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‘Out of Sight’ (1998)
Image Credit: Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection Back before the JLo Industrial Complex was built, Jennifer Lopez could still inhabit a character, which she does with real grit as U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco, entangled with the charming career bank robber who kidnapped her, George Clooney’s Jack Foley, in Steven Soderbergh’s whip-smart, expertly crafted and madly sexy Elmore Leonard adaptation. Whether they’re wriggling together in the trunk of her car, flirting at a hotel bar or getting wet in a tub when Karen surprises Jack during bath time, the pair exude movie-star magic at its most seductive.
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‘Basic Instinct’ (1992)
Image Credit: TriStar/courtesy Everett Collection There’s a reason Paul Verhoeven’s lurid Hitchcockian thriller reliably ends up on every Hollywood erotica list, and it’s not just Sharon Stone turning the simple move of uncrossing and recrossing her legs during a police interrogation into a subversive sexual power play. As Catherine Tramell, a crime novelist linked to a series of brutal ice pick murders, Stone is carnality personified; she makes smoking a cigarette into the most lascivious act ever performed outside a porn movie. It’s no wonder Michael Douglas’ detective is putty in her hands. And her bed, prompting him to describe her as “the fuck of the century.” The big difference from most movies of this type is that the woman is always in charge.
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‘A History of Violence’ (2005)
Image Credit: New Line/courtesy Everett Collection As the title and pretty much his entire filmography makes plain, David Cronenberg has little interest in the romantic aspects of sex and is far more attuned to the baser instincts to which his characters are susceptible. That’s evident in the striking juxtaposition of two scenes here. In the first of them, in which Viggo Mortensen’s character is still passing as the small-town family man, he’s the passive partner, happily letting his role-playing wife (Maria Bello) take the lead in a cheerleader uniform and see-through panties. Later, when he’s been exposed as a gangland thug in hiding, their rough-and-tumble physical union blurs lines of repulsion and desire in a literally bruising session on the stairs. Disturbing, but unforgettable.
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‘Bound’ (1996)
Image Credit: Gramercy Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection It’s a tough call as to whether Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s stylish debut is more beloved by lesbians or gay men. Either way, the pairing of Gina Gershon as tough ex-con plumber Corky and Jennifer Tilly as Violet, a kind of lethal Betty Boop, is as lubricious as it gets. “I’ll bet your car is 20 years old,” says Violet, sizing up Corky in her grease-smeared tank top. “Truck,” Corky corrects her, with a mouth permanently fixed in a sneer. Things really start to crackle between them once they hatch a plan to lift a $2-million mob stash and pin it on Violet’s money-laundering boyfriend. The intimacy of the sex scenes adds passion and urgency to the thriller, while the wealth of quotable dialogue offsets the violence with a delicious hint of camp.
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‘Body Heat’ (1981)
Image Credit: Warner Bros./ Courtesy: Everett Collection. Lawrence Kasdan redefined the neo-noir with this sweaty thriller, borrowing liberally from the classics — most notably Double Indemnity, a little further down on this list — but spicing things up with a sexual candor that was hot and humid even by the standards of the South Florida setting. William Hurt plays Ned Racine, a dodgy lawyer who gets entangled with Matty Walker, bored wife of a wealthy businessman she’s looking to offload. “You’re not too smart, are you?” she observes. “I like that in a man.” The role deservingly made Kathleen Turner and her throaty voice into overnight stars.