The Most Controversial Films of All Time: Films always have the ability to anger us, divide us, shock us, disgust us, and more. Usually, films that inspire controversy, outright boycotting, picketing, banning, censorship, or protest have graphic sex, violence, homosexuality, religious, political or race-related themes and content. They usually push the envelope regarding what can be filmed and displayed on the screen, and are considered taboo, "immoral" or "obscene" due to language, drug use, violence and sensuality/nudity or other incendiary elements. Inevitably, controversy helps to publicize these films and fuel the box-office receipts.

Controversy-invoking films may be from almost any genre - documentaries, westerns, erotic-thrillers, dramas, horror, comedy, or animated, and more. Standards for what may be considered shocking, offensive or controversial have changed drastically over many decades.The voluntary ratings system of the Motion Picture Association of America can influence a film's public showing in a theatre -- an NC-17 rating or an unrated film may often close down a film's screening and lead to commercial failure.

The following illustrated list in the next few web pages, in unranked alphabetical order, presents a solid collection of the most controversial films in cinematic history. Entertainment Weekly's June 16, 2006 issue contained a listing of their top 25 "Most Controversial Movies of All-Time" - included here and indicated with the # numbers after the film title, in this more comprehensive list.

Note: The films that are marked with a yellow star are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the "100 Greatest Films". For the many other milestone films with sexual scenes that were especially notorious, infamous, controversial, or scandalous, see this site's special writeups on Sex in Cinema and the genre of Sexual/Erotic Films.

A Clockwork Orange (1971, UK) # 2
D. Stanley Kubrick

At the time, Stanley Kubrick's randomly ultra-violent, over-indulgent, graphically-stylized film of the near future - and most controversial film - was one of only two movies rated X on its original release (the other was Midnight Cowboy (1969)) that was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. The film was hotly debated when it was released - both highly praised and objectionable for its bleak outlook, and for its pairing of comedy with violence.

The dystopic film about fascist social conditioning and free will was heavily criticized and opposed by religious groups for its sexual and violent content. Feminists were outraged with some of the misogynistic images - such as the obscene female poses of the supine furniture in the Korova bar, the prolonged rape of a big-breasted woman, a gigantic penis sculpture being used as a murder weapon on the Cat Lady, and a view of the protagonist's snake gliding toward a woman's vagina.

The most infamous was the rape scene of Mrs. Alexander (Adrienne Corri) in her opulent house, Alex's (Malcolm McDowell) gang of droogs (Pete, Georgie, and Dim) who were wearing masks with comical noses. After cutting away her skin-tight red jumpsuit Alex delivered horribly vicious blows of his boots to Mr. Alexander's (Patrick Magee) mid-section -- timed rhythmically to his singing of Gene Kelly's tune "Singin' in the Rain". In a later scene, Alex was subjected to corrective treatment -- experimental aversion therapy imposed by the state in which he was behavioristically conditioned (with his eyes clamped wide-open in order to view scenes of violence in films while drugged to induce nausea and forced to listen to his beloved Beethoven) to suppress his violent and sexual drives - and in the process gave up his own individual and personal rights.

Because of the copy-cat violence (some gangs dressed as droogs sang "Singin' in the Rain" as they carried on violently) that the film was blamed for by the media and courts, Kubrick withdrew it from circulation in Britain about a year after its release. Some believed it was because it was rumored that Kubrick and his family had received death threats. It wasn't officially available there again - in theaters or on video - until 2000, a year after his death.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989, UK)
D. Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway designed this cruel, over-the-top, truth-telling film as a metaphoric and allegorical criticism of wasteful and barbaric upper-class consumer society in Western civilization (specifically Thatcherism and Reaganism). The huge restaurant that was the centerpiece of the film was composed of four rooms or sections, each of which was color-coded: the kitchen and storage area (deep jungle-green), the main dining room (hellish blood-red), the restrooms (white), and the adjacent parking lot (cold dark blue).

It told about gluttonous, uncouth, and maniacal boss Thief Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) and his desperate and much-humiliated Wife Georgina (Helen Mirren), who dined at a sumptuous banquet every night (over a nine evening period) at a trendy haute cuisine London restaurant called Le Hollandais run by the kitchen's French chef Richard Borst (Richard Bohringer). He held court around a table where he talked about food, excrement and sex, and surrounded himself with various lackeys and henchmen, and a bookwormish patron diner/Lover Michael (Alan Howard). After discovering his adulterous wife's unfaithfulness and hungry trysts with the Lover (during visits to the ladies' room stall, kitchen and bakery pantry and refrigerated meat freezer in the back of a truck, filmed with unflattering lighting), the brutal Albert decided upon savage, cannibalistic revenge upon the man (ironically stating and foreshadowing: "I'll cook him! And I'll eat him!"). Michael was killed by force-feeding him with pages from a book. To retaliate, Georgina had the Cook bake up her lover's corpse for her husband and then headed a procession bringing in the veiled body for the surprise dinner. She forced him at gunpoint to eat the warmed-up cadaver -- "Try the cock -- it's a delicacy. And you know where it's been." Stunned, Albert took a bite and vomited, as The Wife encouraged him to eat more ("Bon appetit, Albert. That's French") - and then shot him to death - condemning him as a "Cannibal."

The sensational film's putrescence, debasement and excesses (sadism, cannibalism, torture, fornication, puke, and rotting fish and meat) and scatological themes (force-feeding of excrement (termed coprophagy), urination on victims) forced the Motion Picture Association of America to give the film an "X" rating, so the film (after being denied an appeal) was released unrated by the producers, and then given an NC-17 rating by the time of its video release. An alternative R-rated version cut out about 30 minutes of footage.

Crash (1996)
D. David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg's coldly-erotic, dark and disturbing drama examined the lives of a subculture of individuals who had passionate sexual fetishes about deadly car crashes. It told about TV commercial producer/director James Ballard (James Spader) and his open-marriage to icy-blonde wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), who would be turned on by casual talk about each others' extra-marital adulterous affairs during love-making. In the opening scene that showcased three couplings, Catherine enjoyed sex while in contact with cold-steel (she was taken from behind by her flight instructor in a private aircraft hangar as her naked breast's nipple pressed into a steel airplane wing). When James collided with another car on the freeway in a near-fatal accident, the deceased victim/husband passenger was thrown through the windshield onto his hood, while the driver/wife Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) inadvertently revealed partial nudity when she broke free from her seat belt in the twisted wreckage. Subsequently, their first sexual encounter was in the front seat of his new car (same make and model) at an airport garage, as a way to re-establish the 'eroticism' of the crash.

After the accident, the three characters were introduced to a weird cult of individuals who derived sexual pleasure and arousal from car crashes, either as survivors or as impact victims with violated bodies. The group would compulsively stage re-enactments of famous celebrity car accidents (James Dean's fatal crash), observe and talk about their physical deformities from crashes (including wounds, scars, dismemberment, leg braces, crutches and full-body support suits), watch car safety and test crash videos (as pornography) and photograph crash victims, engage in sex in parked or moving cars (even in a car wash), and recklessly drive their cars near each other as foreplay. One physically-deformed impact victim Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) made love to Ballard while braced or harnessed with a full-body support suit of black plastic and stainless steel, offering him her vulva-like scar on the back of one of her thighs. In the film's startling conclusion, Ballard deliberately rear-ended his wife's sports-car; she was thrown from the car onto the ground next to the wreck, where he made love to her from behind, after she regained consciousness and he learned that she was all right (he promised her a more deadly crash the next time): "Maybe the next one, darling. Maybe the next one."

The alternating kinky, perverse and depraved sex scenes juxtaposed with gruesome car crashes was deliberately controversial and repulsive, and thought to possibly inspire people to have fetishistic sex in high-speed vehicles. This provocative film, initially released in two versions rated NC-17 and R, was vilified in much the same way as Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), and the Cannes Film Festival screening had people walking out in disgust, nausea and revulsion. Ultimately, it received a Special Jury Prize "For Originality, For Daring, and For Audacity."

The Crime of Father Amaro (2002, Mex.)
D. Carlos Carrera

This brave, melodramatic romance film was nominated as Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards and Golden Globes, and became Mexico's biggest blockbuster due to the controversy it aroused (it broke Y Tu Mamá También's opening-weekend record). It was adapted to modern times (the year 2002) from the 1875 book "O Crime do Padre Amaro" by Portuguese writer Jose Maria Eça de Queirós. One of the film's criticisms, advertised with the tagline "Love...Lust..Sin", was that it wasn't faithful to the novel.

Recently-ordained and celibate handsome 24 year-old priest Father Amaro (Gael García Bernal) on his first assignment was sent to a parish (steeped in illicit love, corruption and drug trafficking/money laundering by drug lords, and cynicism) in the remote Mexican town of Los Reyes. There, he became infatuated with beautiful, virginal 16 year-old devout catechism teacher Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancón), in part due to her confessional that she erotically touched herself in the bath while having thoughts about Jesus, with his offering of advice: "Sensuality is no sin." He dressed her body in the Virgin's blue satin cloak ("You are more beautiful than the blessed Virgin") originally made for the local church's statue of the virgin Mary, and engaged in an illicit union with her under the guise of training her to be a nun. He spoke memorized portions of the Old Testament's "Song of Solomon" to poetically admire her breasts.

To make matters complicated, the young girl's mother Sanjuanera (Angelica Aragon) had been engaged in a long-term affair with retiring priest Father Benito (Sancho Gracia). The film also included some blasphemous images, such as one of consecrated communion wafers being fed to a sickly cat. After getting her pregnant, the young idealistic priest covered up by paying for an abortion in an illegal clinic in the jungle.

Catholic groups in Mexico called for the scandalous film to be banned for its "vicious," defaming and unfavorable portrait of priests, and the church threatened to excommunicate its stars. The engendered controversy only aided the film's visibility and profitability.

Cruising (1980)
D. William Friedkin

William Friedkin's notorious, grisly thriller film about a police investigation told about the seedy and dangerous underworld of gay S&M in NY's heavy leather bars (including The Ramrod), and included actual leather-clad gay patrons as extras in the meat-packing district rather than actors.

The controversial film about an alternative or extreme lifestyle starred Al Pacino as a sexually-confused undercover cop (posing and transforming himself into a gay man in order to fit the killer's victim profile) named Steve Burns investigating violent serial killer murders in the Big Apple's homosexual underworld. In one startling scene, Pacino was tied up butt-naked on a bed and threatened with a knife. By film's end, Burns continued to visit gay bars even after the serial killer was caught -- and a last-minute murder opened up the suggestion that Burns was the killer, thereby connecting violence with the homosexual lifestyle.

The film opened with a disclaimer: "The film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world and is not meant to be a representative of the whole." However, major protests by gay groups - the first of their kind - accused the film of being anti-gay and homophobic prior to the AIDS crisis for its depiction of the gritty, kinky, dangerous, sex-obsessed and depraved lifestyle of homosexuals. The protest centered around the film's ultra-provocative plot -- murders in gay nightclubs, and the film's negative and stereotypical view of gays portrayed as psychopaths, sexual deviants, and sexual predators engaged in violent fetishistic activity and various hardcore sexual acts (i.e., a scene of fisting with a nearly naked man shackled and hanging from the ceiling).

One questionably campy scene, a police interrogation, involved a large black man in thong underwear and a cowboy hat inexplicably conducting the brutal questioning. The film also included an extended sequence of the climactic and ferocious stabbing scene ("You made me do that" was offered as justification). The current truncated film still lacks approximately 40 minutes of footage that were censored and edited out.

Two months after the film was released, a man killed two patrons and injured almost a dozen others at The Ramrod with a sub-machine gun.

The Da Vinci Code (2006) # 13
D. Ron Howard

Director Ron Howard's much-anticipated, big-screen religious conspiracy thriller with the tagline "Seek the Truth" was faithfully based upon Dan Brown's best-selling fictional book. It told about an investigation by symbologist and Harvard professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) after the discovery of the murder of the Louvre Museum's elderly curator Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle).

The man's naked body was found with symbols and an enigmatic encrypted code written in blood, a scrambled numerical sequence, and a revealing pose. [He was murdered by self-flagellating albino monk Silas (Paul Bettany) in the employ of devious Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina).] This information led the wrongly-accused murder suspect Langdon and Sophie through a byzantine trail of clues -- to a millenarian secret sect called The Priory of Sion (with heretical theories about the marriage of a mortal Jesus Christ with Mary Magdalene and fathering a child - the real Holy Grail!) and crippled Grail scholar Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen). The search also led them to knowledge of the Priory's centuries-old battle with the clandestine Catholic sect Opus Dei regarding a 2,000 year old conspiracy to hush information, new findings about the Holy Grail, to Da Vinci's master work The Last Supper, London's mythical Church Temple (where a group of Templars Knights were believed to be buried), and Sir Isaac Newton's tomb at Westminster Abbey.

Several Catholic and Opus Dei groups, as well as conservative Christian groups, called for a boycott, mostly during the making of the film, accusing it of blasphemy. Even albinos were offended by the film, and lobbied for changes to the way the film portrayed them. Yet the tedious film was received lukewarmly as a convoluted, flat and stultified bore.

Deep Throat (1972) # 4
D. Gerard Damiano

Unintended for mainstream audiences, this notorious X-rated porn flick from writer/director Gerard Damiano became one of the decade's top-grossing films, and the most influential and successful (and profitable) of all films of its kind. Deep Throat was filmed in 6 days for $25,000 and was subsequently banned in 23 US states.

It was an 'event' film - a hard-core stag film that was OK to see on a date or in mixed company, yet it was banned in many localities as obscene. It inaugurated a period known as "Porno Chic" - it was the first cross-over adults-only film that became a hit. After its initial period of release, it became a cultural phenomenon and it was fashionable to talk about the film (and its educationally feminist theme of female sexual gratification) or make references to it (such as Watergate's 'Deep Throat').

This hour-long, revolutionary X-rated film (shot in about a week's time, with graphic enactments of oral, vaginal and anal sex, group sex, and masturbation in a dozen and a half sex scenes) told a simplistic plot (with some comic elements) about a sexually frustrated woman (Linda Lovelace, born Linda Susan Boreman) who wanted to "hear bells" during sex. Her doctor, Dr. Young (Harry Reems, born Herbert Streicher) discovered that her clitoris was located in her throat, and that she would have to experiment with various clients before experiencing orgasm -- this ultimately led to her sexual fulfillment accompanied by fireworks, rockets blasting and ringing bells.

Years after the film was screened, Lovelace denounced the film, claiming that she was drugged, coerced and raped during filming and that "there was a gun to my head the entire time". In the mid-70s, actor Reems was prosecuted by the federal government (under the Nixon administration) on obscenity charges - a first - although later overturned, and the film was championed by Hollywood and other intellectuals for its liberated defense of First Amendment rights.

An R-rated documentary film titled Inside Deep Throat (2005) examined the film's production history and impact on American culture, including interviews with both the director and male star Harry Reems.