Image Credit: 20th Century Fox Film Corp.Īdrian 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. 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. 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. Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collectionįew 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. 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 I’m not claiming these are the sexiest films in Hollywood - or Hollywood-adjacent - history. The titles and the order they appear in could be completely different a month from now. 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. 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?”) Witness the online emergence of delicate Gen Z flowers calling for the removal of sex and nudity from movies. 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. Such joyful sex-positivity in movies has been on the decline of late. Among the taboos she gleefully shatters is the notion that respectable women must display a decorously prim attitude toward sex.īella 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. 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.
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.
“Why do people not just do this all the time?”