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.

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) # 3
D. Michael Moore

Michael Moore's controversial 'documentary' film was a critical expose and scathing indictment of the George W. Bush presidency and administration for its handling of the terrorist crisis and his alleged connections to Al-Qaeda leader Bin Laden's family. It was accused of being propagandistic - especially in an election year - and that it contained half-truths and distortions of facts, and some conservative groups called for theaters to not screen it.

The documentary film was included among the Cannes Film Festival's main competition (only the second time in 48 years for a documentary) - and won the top prize called the Palme D'or - the first for a documentary in nearly 50 years. It also broke the record for highest opening-weekend earnings in the US for a documentary, and established a significant precedent for a political documentary (eventually earning $119 million) as the highest-grossing, non-concert, non-IMAX documentary film of all time.

The controversial film had earlier gained further publicity and notoriety when Disney opted not to distribute the film through its Miramax subsidiary unit, and Moore accused the company of censorship. Disney's refusal to let Miramax release it, because it would risk causing a partisan battle and alienate customers, actually contributed to the film's great success. [Supposedly, Disney also feared the film might endanger tax breaks Disney received in Florida where its theme parks were located, and where the president's brother, Jeb Bush, was governor at the time.] Although the film was rated R, under protest from filmmaker Moore, some theaters defied the rating and allowed teenagers (without guardians) to attend.

Memorable images include Bush's continued reading of the children's book "My Pet Goat" in a Florida elementary school after the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center (filmmaker Michael Moore narrated: "When informed of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, where terrorists had struck just eight years prior, Mr. Bush decided to go ahead with his photo opportunity..."), the many self-incriminating Bush clips (such as when he demonstrated his golf swing - "Now watch this drive!" - immediately after calling on nations to stop terrorist killers, his stumbling through speeches and delivering such damning lines as: "What an impressive crowd: the haves, and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite, I call you my base"); the documentarian's questioning of Democratic and Republican politicians about enrolling their sons for military duty; the mall scenes in which Marine recruiters targeted minority teenagers for enrollment, and Bush's inept handling of the terrorist crisis and his agenda (after 9/11) to illegitimately launch a pre-emptive war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This MGM horror production starred real-life circus side-show performers (a cornucopia of 'human oddities', including Siamese twins Daisy and Violet, Prince Randian - the "Living Torso", Johnny the 'half-boy', the armless girl, the bearded lady, and three 'pinheads' or microcephalics). It was an out-of-the-ordinary picture not easily forgotten, causing both revulsion and fascination.

In the film's terrorizing and shocking climax, strong man Hercules (Henry Victor) and aerialist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) were both pursued in parallel by the grotesque 'freaks' with knives during a stormy night, crawling through mud in vengeful pursuit of their victims. The film was released officially (five months after disastrous preview showings) and found to be exploitative, abhorrent and "loathsome" with "unwholesome shockery", although it also portrayed the 'abnormal and the unwanted' as resilient and adaptable human beings with complete compassion and understanding. Overall, it made audiences uncomfortable and engendered fright, uneasiness and animosity.

After initial preview screenings, MGM ordered Browning to remove the alarming film's most "offensive" segments (approximately 26 minutes), including the original closing scene of an emasculated Hercules singing falsetto (after castration) in "Tetrallini's Freaks and Music Hall". And a final epilogue was tacked on with a 'happy ending' to lessen the shock of the film's original ending -- the sight of Cleopatra ("the peacock of the air") turned into a legless human chicken with one eye blinded. However, the changes in the film did not improve the film's box-office business and it was a major financial failure. Tod Browning's career, which was booming after directing Dracula (1931), was destroyed.

MGM pulled the film from distribution a month after its release, and in 1947, exhibition rights were sold to exploitation filmmaker/distributor Dwain Esper for the next 25 years. It was toured for an adults-only roadshow with alternative titles (i.e., Forbidden Love, The Monster Show, and Nature's Mistakes), exploitative taglines, such as: "Do Siamese Twins Make Love?" and "Can a Full Grown Woman Truly Love a Midget?" The film was banned outright in England for 31 years (until the early 1960s).

Hail, Mary (1985, Fr.) (aka Je vous salue, Marie)
D. Jean-Luc Godard

Director Jean-Luc Godard's controversial and upsetting film (condemned and denounced by Pope John Paul II at one time and picketed at theatres) retold the story of the virgin birth and Mary, for modern times, with Myriem Roussel as a young teenaged basketball player named Marie who worked as an attendant in her father's garage and her petulant boyfriend Joseph (Thierry Rode), a taxi-cab driver - who have a chaste relationship; one of Joseph's fares was the angel Gabriel (Philippe Lacoste) who told Marie that she was mysteriously pregnant and would give birth to the resurrected Jesus Christ; a visit to the gynecologist confirmed that she was indeed pregnant without having had sex; outrage came over the reinterpretation of the Immaculate Conception and the fact that Roussel was often in various states of objectively-viewed, non-prurient undress throughout the film; for instance, in one scene, she resisted the human temptation to masturbate.

Heaven's Gate (1980)
D. Michael Cimino

This notorious, big-budget epic film was a major financial disaster for its studio (United Artists, the studio of Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks) - it also was a disaster for the western film genre for the remainder of the 80s, and it ended the reign of the New Wave of 1970's 'auteurs' or independent film-makers. Its self-indulgent, financially-irresponsible and excessive writer/director, Michael Cimino, who had been praised for his Best Picture and Best Director-winning The Deer Hunter (1978), took the brunt of much of the film's criticism, for its ballooning budget that was almost six times above-budget to produce (from $7.5 million to about $44 million), for its overlong incomprehensible plot (originally a 5-hour version that was cut down to 219 minutes ), for its miscasting and slow pacing, for its expensive on-location shooting and fastidious over-attention to detail and historical accuracy - all for a film without major stars. Following its initial release in late 1980, the film was pulled from theatres, edited down by over an hour in length, and re-released a few months later, although it still failed miserably. UA's corporate parent, Transamerica, was forced to sell the bankrupted studio to MGM for only $350 million as a result.

Heaven's Gate was one of the first films to be prejudged by a critic. The infamous review of New York Times critic Vincent Canby ("It fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter and the Devil has just come around to collect") built negative press until Cimino's film was doomed to have an un-profitable theatrical release. The film received numerous Razzie Award nominations including a Worst Director prize for Cimino, although it received generally positive reviews after release to video, and fairly good results from its international box-office. It was critically re-evaluated by the LA-based Z Channel when it premiered on cable TV in its uncut version in 1982, but it was already too late.

The documentary Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate (2004), composed of a series of interviews (and based on Steven Bach's 1985 book of the same name), provided a behind-the-scenes look at the film - one of Hollywood's most notorious disasters. The film became the biggest flop in film history at the time (US box-office was only about $1.5 million), and since then has been synonymous for any film judged to be a monumental 'turkey' that faced major financial disaster.

Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer (1986) (released in 1990)
D. John McNaughton

John McNaughton's realistic, disturbing "fictional dramatization", his directorial debut film shot in 4 weeks on a budget of about $100,000, was based on the confessions of famed, pathological, 'real-life' convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas (played by Michael Rooker in his feature film debut), who ended up on death row in Texas. The grisly horror-slasher film's detached and amoral documentary style and tone of filming enhanced each brutal, gory and violent killing (15 in the film) by the murderer, first viewed as a series of grotesque tableaux.

There were numerous sickening, brutally-violent cinema-verite off-screen and on-screen murders by psychotic murderer Henry, including the death of a young woman left disemboweled and lying in a ditch, and shots-to-the-heads of a storeowner couple (Elizabeth and Ted Kaden), a prostitute (Mary Demas) killed in a bathroom with a broken soda bottle in her face, and especially the beating, torture, sexual assault, and killing of a helpless family in their suburban home - and then afterwards, the viewing (and re-viewing) of the grainy, unfocused, and poorly-photographed account of the crime shot on videotape by murderers Henry and his prison buddy Otis (Tom Towles).

It was so controversial that it was given an X-rating, and had very limited release in the US. Due to a ratings controversy with the MPAA, its release was held up for a few years. Its release was delayed until 1993 in the UK and even then, two minutes of the film's violent content was spliced out. An uncut version of the movie was eventually allowed for video release in 2003.

I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967, Swe.) # 18
D. Vilgot Sjöman

This landmark, avante-garde, mock-documentary film (shot with mostly hand-held cameras) allegedly included 'offensive' sexual scenes that were claimed to be pornographic at the time - scenes of full frontal nudity of both sexes (at 38 minutes into the film), simulated intercourse, and the kissing of the male's flaccid penis (over a full hour into the film). By today's standards, it is considered tame, although it helped to open the floodgates toward hard-core pornography and films such as the X-rated Best Picture Midnight Cowboy (1969), the porno chic Deep Throat (1972), and Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972).

The radical, experimental film-within-a-film of sexual politics told the dull and pretentious story of liberated 22 year-old Lena (Lena Nyman), an aspiring sociologist who was curious about political issues in late 60s Sweden, with endless soul-searching, lengthy street interviews with common people about the class system, newsreel footage, scenes of protest regarding the Vietnam War, scribbled on-screen slogans, her cataloguing of information, etc. Sexual interludes between Lena and car salesman Börje Ahlstedt (mirrored in the film and real life by a tumultuous triangle with director Vilgot Sjöman) are shot frankly and realistically.

US Customs seized the film in 1968, and the courts (and the Supreme Court) originally determined that the movie was 'obscene', although this verdict was overturned after appeal. It became a benchmark film for free-speech advocates.

It soon became the highest-grossing foreign film (at $20 million) released in the US for decades (a record that stood until Il Postino broke the mark in the mid 1990's), although the film was picketed. Unused footage and alternate takes from the film were culled for a concurrent, parallel film I Am Curious (Blue) (1968, Swe.) - the choice of colors represented the two colors of the Swedish flag.

Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (1974)
D. Don Edmonds

This cult classic was the original film in a series of infamous, violent and shocking exploitation films, all with the title of Ilsa (based upon the real-life actual Nazi named Ilse Koch known as the "Bitch of Buchenwald", and reportedly upon actual tortures and atrocities during the Holocaust). The so-called Nazi-exploitation film's subtitle advertised that Ilsa herself was: "The Most Dreaded Nazi of Them All." Although dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust, the film was banned in Germany. There were also three low-budget sequels including Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), Ilsa: The Tigress of Siberia (1977), and Ilsa: The Wicked Warden (1977) (also pictured).

This sick and semi-pornographic film with abundant gratuitous nudity and gruesome incidents (such as flesh-eating maggots) was shot on the set used for the Hogan's Heroes TV show after it was cancelled in the early 70s. Nymphomaniacal Ilsa (Las Vegas showgirl Dyanne Thorne) was featured as the big-busted, blonde Nazi POW camp's (stalag) over-the-top sadistic, dominatrix commandant who personally inspected stripped female prisoners (including cult starlets Sharon Kelly and Uschi Digard) and performed 'scientific' experiments upon them, as well as forced herself upon male prisoners and then castrated them.

In the Realm of the Senses (1976, Jp.) (aka Ai No Corrida)
D. Nagisa Oshima

This erotic Japanese masterpiece about painful passion told the story of a torrid, increasingly intense and dangerous, true-to-life, almost non-stop sexual affair between gangster businessman Kichizo (Tatsuya Fuji) and one of his servants, former prostitute Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) in mid-1930s Japan. The film, produced in France, reflected the tradition of erotic Japanese wood-block prints, the shunga, in which the faces were stylized, but the sexual organs (especially the phallus) were shown aroused, enlarged and delineated with almost topographical detail and care.

This sexually adventurous, lurid arthouse film about unadulterated desire deliberately broke the taboo in Japanese cinema against showing female pubic hair and sex organs. It had an orgy scene and contained explicit shots of fellatio (while he passively laid back and smoked a cigarette) with semen dripping from her mouth, penetration, a wide variety of sexual positions and sexual acts (some in close-up) such as a boiled egg inserted into her vagina, sexual violence and masochism (forcible use of a wooden dildo, bite-wounds, S&M, etc.), and masturbation during a bloody menstrual period. Almost penis-fixated, she innocently stated: "Isn't it natural for a woman to love the sex of the man she loves?" Most notoriously, it depicted the infamous, violent scene of their disturbing practice of auto-erotic asphyxiation with a red scarf to aid their sexual excitement - and even worse, bloody castration-dismemberment by film's end so that she could keep his member inside of her. Afterwards, the empowered female carried around her master-lover's severed genitals in a handkerchief for four days - an enactment of her proprietary feelings about his member - until she was arrested.

The shocking film of extreme, all-consuming sexual obsession and immersion, bordering on pornography in its uncut version, was seized and banned by US Customs and postponed in its censored release. It caused a sensation - and lively discussion - at the Melbourne Film Festival in 1976 when first released.

Irreversible (2002, Fr.)
D. Gaspar Noe

Frenchman writer/director Gaspar Noe's hard-hitting, graphic, profoundly disturbing and violent film about rape revenge, was non-linear - it was told in flashback and reverse order in continuously-filmed takes, similar in structure to Christopher Nolan's Memento, with the theme: "Time destroys everything." The fatalistically-tinged film implied that the characters in the film were predestined (irreversibly) to face what would happen to them.

It was also noted for its excruciatingly-long, almost-unbearable, nine-minute real-time beating and anal-rape sequence - shot with a static camera - of Alex (Monica Bellucci) in a deserted Parisian underpass tunnel lit by a reddish glow, by stranger-rapist Le Tenia/Tapeworm (Jo Prestia). It was followed by a love-making scene (earlier in the chronology) of Alex with boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel) (with Marcus' prophetically-teasing line: "I want to f--k you in the ass"), and ended with a beautiful scene of Alex relaxing in a sunny park with children playing.

Besides that, there was the horrific, violent and vengeful scene of Marcus and Alex's ex-boyfriend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) searching in retribution in a gay S&M night-club sex bar filled with leather-bondage patrons called The Rectum. It culminated with the vicious revenge beating of the suspected rapist - with the man's head beaten to a pulp with a fire extinguisher.