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Sex in Cinema: |
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Sex in Cinema: |
 
Sex in Cinema: In the following collection, excerpted from the
Mini-History of Sex in the Cinema
at this site, here are some of the most significant milestones, and
most influential and memorable sexual/erotic scenes and films on the
big screen through cinematic history. Most of these films, with portrayals
of sex and/or nudity, were considered quite erotic, groundbreaking,
unique and/or controversial at the time. HISTORY OF SEX IN CINEMA - INDEX (chronological by film title) Intro | Part
1 | Part 2 | Part
3 | Part 4 | Part
5 | Part 6 | Part
7 | Part 8 | Part
9 | Part 10 | |
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| Greatest and Most Influential Erotic / Sexual Films and Scenes (chronological by film title) 
Milestone Films With Scenes That Were Especially
Notorious, Infamous, Controversial, or Scandalous |
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| Movie Title |
Brief Scene Description | Example |
| Malena (2000, It./US)
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Director Giuseppe Tornatore's (known for Cinema Paradiso (1988)) nostalgic coming of age story during 1940s fascist-wartime Sicily told of a voluptuous, mistreated war widow Malena (Monica Bellucci, a beautiful model turned actress) - a seductive, luscious heroine (with flowery dresses) in the friendless seaside town of Castelcuto and the object of transfixed romantic infatuation for 13 year old Italian boy Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro) who rode a second-hand bicycle; the maturing adolescent boy imagined her as his co-star in elaborate, sexually-charged erotic fantasies (of making love to her) inspired by his favorite movies; small-town prejudice from jealous women falsely accused her of adultery, as circumstances forced non-conformist and widowed Malena to become a prostitute, when the townsfolk again scorned her and left her severely beaten, bloody and half-naked in the street; the European release of 106 minutes was cut to 92 minutes by Miramax to reduce the liberal scenes of nudity for American audiences |
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Maze (2000)
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Co-writer/producer/director/star Rob Morrow's character study/romance of Tourette Syndrome-afflicted New York artist Lyle Maze also featured a very full-frontal nude scene of Oscar-nominated (for You Can Count on Me (2000)) Laura Linney (as idealistic doctor's (Craig Sheffer) live-in lover/girlfriend and fashion stylist Callie) posing for the painter while her boyfriend/doctor Mike was on an extended overseas medical mission; a romantic triangle between the three major characters was the major predictable plotline in this melodrama; in another scene, Lenna (Sheila Zane) also posed naked for the artist |  
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| The Monkey's Mask (2000, Aus.)
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In this erotic and provocative, neo-noir murder mystery-thriller directed by Samantha Lang, Kelly McGillis starred as a married, short-haired, alluring, open-minded bisexual poetry professor (and femme fatale) named Dr. Diana Maitland, who was drawn into a torrid, lustful lesbian love affair with ex-cop turned private investigator Jill Fitzpatrick (Susie Porter) searching for the strangulation murderer of young Mickey Norris (Abbie Cornish) - a university student of love/sex poetry in Sydney; the film contained various graphic sex scenes between McGillis and Porter |    |
Naked States (2000)
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In this highly-rated, attention-getting HBO documentary (America's Undercover series), photographer Spencer Tunick traveled cross-country around America for five months in the late 90s to capture uneroticized pictures of nudes in every US state; he specialized in images of people becoming spontaneously nude, often in large group settings, such as the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada, a gathering of the New Jersey Tri-State Naturists, a biker rally in South Dakota, on a busy NYC street at Times Square -- or at a Phish rock concert in Maine with 1200 nude concert-goers; many everyday folks were interviewed for their views on body image and on getting nude, often describing liberation and self-expression |    |
| 100 Girls (2000)
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Writer/director Michael Davis' Cinderella-like teen-sex comedy (direct-to-video) told about geeky, love-struck college student Matthew's (Jonathan Tucker) desperate quest for a mystery woman, later discovered to be promiscuous art-school student Patty (Emmanuelle Chriqui) (pictured), with whom he had sex in a darkened elevator during a power outage/blackout one night; the only clue he had was her pair of panties - to which he went on a search (involving scenes of voyeurism, various disguises, and burglaries) to find the matching bra in a girls' dormitory ("virgin vault") of 100 girls - the film's title; although there were many sexy females in this film and sex-filled dialogue, there was minimal outright nudity among lonely ("ugly chick"?) intellectual outcast Dora (Marissa Ribisi) (pictured), window girl (Biljana Filipovic) (pictured), voluptuous, red bra-wearing tomboy Arlene (Katherine Heigl) (pictured), breast-scribbling cheater Irene (Ivana Bozilovic) (pictured), cute girl-next-door Wendy (Larisa Oleynik), and blonde goddess Cynthia (Jamie Pressly); in a memorable monologue, Matthew vowed he would be transformed by his dream woman: "With me, you'll find the cap is always on the toothpaste. I'll start wearing those bikini style underwear if you like. My belly button will always be lint free. I want to full-on kiss your clitoris. It will be the most passionate, intimate experience you've ever had. I declare now, I will give my life for you" |
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| Quills (2000)
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Director Philip Kaufman's major studio film, an R-rated historical drama, starred Geoffrey Rush as the victimized, crazed and imprisoned Marquis de Sade as an inmate in the Charenton Asylum for the Insane run by the head priest Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix); the censored author (appearing naked at times) persuaded one of the insane asylum's laundry girls, Madeleine (Kate Winslet), to smuggle in writing paper and ink so that he could continue his work; during the course of the film, Coulmier developed an attraction for the disciplined (whipped) laundry girl punished for her infraction - who later became the innocent victim of an asylum riot; in the film's major fantasy sequence (of necrophilia), when she was put on display in the asylum's chapel with a very filmy cloth over her naked body, Coulmier pulled back the sheet and started to kiss and fondle her - he started to make love to her, and climbed on top of her -- and then was startled when her eyes opened and she kissed him back and held him as they started to make love (with her legs around him), until a pounding at the door awakened him from his perverse dream -- he horrifically realized that he was embracing a corpse |
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| Rated X (2000)
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Distributed by cable TV's Showtime Network and directed by actor Emilio Estevez, this film was a semi-biopic portrayal of American sleazy-porn pioneers of San Francisco - The Mitchell Brothers; it was advertised as having "no limits" - with Charlie Sheen as coke-addicted younger brother Artie and Estevez himself (Sheen's real-life brother) as balding Jim; this film, told in flashback, surveyed their early grindhouse film-making days, their establishment and proprietorship of the O'Farrell Theater, the production of X-rated Behind the Green Door with Marilyn Chambers (Tracy Hutson of TV's Extreme Makeover - Home Edition), their spiraling-down lives due to drug and alcohol use, and personal conflict leading to the death of Artie at the hands of his own brother in 1991 |    |
| Reindeer Games (2000) (aka Deception)
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John Frankenheimer's action-crime thriller starred Charlize Theron as beautiful femme fatale Ashley (Charlize Theron) - a dead con's pen-pal girlfriend - who engaged in a wild sex scene in a motel room in the film's opening to seduce ex-con auto-thief Rudy Duncan (Ben Affleck) who assumed his cellmate's identity, and who reluctantly got involved in a plan to hold up the Tomahawk Indian reservation casino in Michigan; she provided some gratuitous topless nudity (after removing her black bikini top) in a swimming pool scene with her psychopathic outlaw brother Gabriel (Gary Sinese) |   |
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Director Darren Aronofsky's effective and disturbing film told about the consequences of drug use for four individuals: lonely, TV-addicted, diet-pill-popping Brighton Beach widow Sara Goldfarb (Oscar-nominated Ellen Burstyn), her heroin-addicted son Harry (Jared Leto), his best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and Harry's girlfriend Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly); the depths of despairing pain were reached by Marion, earlier seen in full-frontal before a mirror; she was forced to prostitute herself to pay for her heroin addiction by participating in a nasty lesbian orgy scene (at a stag party hosted by black pimp Little John (Keith David)) that shocked the MPAA (rating it NC-17) and caused the film to be released unrated by Artisan (although a slightly modified R-rated video version was later released as well); in a degrading so-called "ass-to-ass" scene, she shared a two-headed dildo with another female as a group of spectators watched, tossed bills at them, and shouted: "Ass-to-ass!" and "Come! Come! Come!" |   
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| Road Trip (2000)
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Documentarian Todd Phillips' fiction-film debut was this raunchy, vulgar gross-out teen comedy that was typical of the new decade - with plentiful sex gags; it featured beautiful, seductive, and aggressive sorority girl Beth Wagner (Amy Smart) whose one-night-stand sexual romp after stripping down to red panties as payback to male classmate Josh (Breckin Meyer) was videotaped and accidentally mailed to the guy's girlfriend Tiffany Henderson (Rachel Blanchard) -- to set up the cross-country road trip of the film's title from Ithaca, New York to Austin, Texas to intercept the damaging tape; another scene involved a student named Barry Manilow (Tom Green) at a party - who narrated the entire film in flashback - conducting a sexual 'educational' experiment (rubbing each other's bare nipples) with two topless co-eds (Aerica D'Amaro and Bridgett Wise - each billed as Barry's Girl); several other females were gratuitously naked (Jaclyn DeSantis as Heather and Aliya Campbell as Wendy, others full frontal) in a pictorialization of Barry's story in a girls' locker room |
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Scary Movie (2000)
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This R-rated comedy-horror spoof film (with many sequels in subsequent years) was accused of over-the-top tasteless, and offensive violence and sex; it opened with the parody scene of Drew Decker (Carmen Electra) being stalked by the masked killer (resembling the Scream murderer) - in which her breast transplant was ripped out of her chest by the killer's knife when she was stabbed; it also included an outrageous and tasteless orgasm scene in which a virginal Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) was encouraged to give oral sex to her sex-crazed boyfriend Bobby Prinze (Jon Abrahams) ("It's like sucking on a tootsie roll pop...a cherry flavored one with fudge in the middle") - when she bit down hard on him, but shortly afterwards, she was propelled to the ceiling with a gusher when he had an explosive orgasm; his ejaculation caused a massive firehose stream of whitish liquid to shower her upwards; in another scene in a bathroom stall, a penis first tickled and then burrowed its way into Ray's (Shawn Wayans) ear and exited out his other ear on the other side of his head |     
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| The Whole Nine Yards (2000)
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Jonathan Lynn's black comedy crime caper with multiple double-crosses starred Amanda Peet as Jill St. Claire - a wide-eyed, perky dental assistant in suburban Montreal whose boss Dr. Nick "Oz" Oseransky (Matthew Perry) was pursued by a contract killer hired by his nasty French-Canadian wife Sophie (Rosanna Arquette); the next-door contract killer was named Jimmy "the Tulip" Tudeski (Bruce Willis) who advised his starry-eyed wanna-be hitman apprentice Jill to strip down to heels and a gun at the top of a staircase to get the edge on two hitmen; she innocently asked the two: "Hi. Are you guys looking for someone?" to distract them before they were both shot in the back and then helped by using a gun to kill a third man |    |
Five of the 2001 Academy Award Oscar nominees
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In this year alone, five of the Oscar nominees for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress had at one time or another performed in a film role that required nudity --
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 Halle Berry - Swordfish (2001)  Nicole Kidman - Eyes Wide Shut (1999)  Kate Winslet - Jude (1996)  Sissy Spacek - Prime Cut (1972)  Helen Mirren - Savage Messiah (1972) |
| Apocalypse Now Redux (2001, 1979)
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Francis Ford Coppola's re-released, 'director's version' included 49 more minutes of mostly unnecessary, excised scenes added - including extended scenes of nudity and melancholy-tinged sexual adventure during the boat journey upriver; after trading sex for fuel, they encountered stranded, naive, dirt-covered and vulnerable Playboy bunnies from the evacuated USO show - Lance (Sam Bottoms) with Playmate of the Year Carrie Foster (real 1974 PMOY Cyndi or Cynthia Wood) while Chef's (Frederic Forrest) dream girl dalliance in the helicopter was with centerfold Miss May (non-Playmate actress Colleen Camp) whom he insisted pose to resemble her magazine's pictorial; in an additional lengthy "French plantation" segment, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) had an opium-clouded sexual encounter with widowed French colonist Roxanne Sarrault (Aurore Clement) who released the mosquito-netting around the poster bed |
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Director Larry Clark's controversial, raw and courageous film about teens, sex, and violence (due to high school revenge) was released unrated to avoid the NC-17 kiss of death because of numerous semi-explicit scenes of unprotected sex; it was accused of being a porno film with good-looking teen actors that was masquerading as an issue film; it told about amoral, sexually-active, thoughtless, and depraved slacker teenagers in S. Florida in the early 90s who plotted to kill one of their own, Bobby (Nick Stahl), who had sadistically victimized others and raped two female teens in the group: Lisa and Ali (Rachel Miner and Bijou Phillips); the story was based on a real-life crime - the 1993 murder of a teen who had abused his friends and classmates; this grim film was accused of being exploitative, leering, and prurient -- a questionable example of camerawork was found in two obvious, voyeuristic crotch shots of Ali (with barely concealed genitals, although partially covered by her cut-off shorts) while she climbed from the back to the front seat of a car, and in another scene when she was on the phone while getting a pedicure |     |
| The Center of the World (2001)
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Director Wayne Wang's (known for The Joy Luck Club (1993)) erotic, semi-pornographic drama was the grim story of a three-day weekend, sexual contract (for $10,000) between rich, apathetic, and lonely Internet dot.com entrepreneur/geek Richard Longman (Peter Sarsgaard) and part-time rock drummer, pretty lap dancer and tough-minded stripper Florence (Canadian actress Molly Parker) from the upscale Pandora's Box club, although both lead actors had body doubles; in one scene, she asked him: "Do you have a secret fantasy?...Tell me" - and he whispered in her ear about a very taboo anal sex practice with alcohol and an ice cube called "fire and ice"; they journeyed to Las Vegas during her contracted time - with supposedly 'no-strings-attached' as a paid escort in a deluxe hotel room (with the following ground rules: no kissing on the mouth, no emotional feelings talk, no penetration, her own room, and restricted sexual contact hours); the film was shot with natural light on Hi-Def digital video, and released unrated (undoubtedly would have been NC-17 for anal and oral sex and prolonged foreplay scenes, especially for its infamous scene of a stripper (porn star Alisha Klass) inserting a lollipop into herself; it was especially criticized for part-time prostitute Jerri's (Carla Gugino) monologue comparing female orgasms to male ejaculation, its image of menstrual blood, some of its degrading scenes and its denouement - a parting-of-the-ways scene of brutal sexual humiliation in which Florence masturbated in front of Richard as she told him: "You want real? I'll give you real" |      |
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Catherine Breillat's disturbing, controversial, and explicit unglamorous view of the painfulness of adolescent sexuality told about overweight, underappreciated 12 year-old Anais (Anais Reboux) who thought she should lose her virginity to nobody: "The first time should be with nobody"; she was contrasted to her pretty and thin 15-year-old sister, Elena (Roxane Mesquida) while they were on a holiday on the south French coast with their mother (Arsinee Khanjian); within her sister's view in their shared room where disdainful Anais pretended to be asleep, night-gown wearing, under-aged Elena lost her virginity to insincere, deceitful yet charming Italian college student Fernando (Libero de Rienzo) in an explicit, discomfiting scene in which he broke down her defenses and stole her innocence through continued manipulation and persuasion (he assured her: "All the girls take it the back way...That way, it doesn't count. They can say that they've never slept with anyone...It's not sick. It's a proof of love"); in another shocking scene (that was seriously excised for DVD/video release), Anais was sexually assaulted in a brutal rape (an imagined fantasy?) by a total stranger |
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Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
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This exceptional anime-like film, done completely in astronomically-expensive CGI over a four year period was the first photo-realistic, computer-generated feature film with convincing, accurately-detailed, life-like flesh-and-blood characters, inspired by a best-selling series of video games by the film's director, Hironobu Sakaguchi; its main character was smart and slim virtual brunette heroine Aki Ross (voice of Ming-Na), looking like a curvier version of actress Bridget Fonda, who sought to save the world, combat the ghostlike enemy forces and defend Earth's survivors by "collecting" Eight Spirits; following the film's release, men's magazine Maxim created a bikinied version of the sexy 'synthetic actress' that readers voted as one of its Hot 100 - its first computer-generated entry | 
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The Hole (2001)
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Nick Hamm's straight-to-video psychological thriller, told with Rashomon- or Memento- style point-of-view flashbacks starred American Beauty's Thora Birch and co-starred waifish 15 year-old Keira Knightley (in one of her earliest film appearances) as British private school student Frankie; she endured suffering (and died from bulemia-related heart failure) with three other schoolmates while unexpectedly locked and left in an abandoned underground bomb shelter ("the hole") due to a lover's triangle; the film has become notable almost solely for Knightley's nude scenes in the film -- flashing herself in a window and as an unclothed corpse in the morgue, although Knightley also appeared semi-nude in two 2005 films: Domino (2005) and The Jacket (2005), and in Silk (2006) |   The Hole (2001)  Domino (2005)  The Jacket (2005) |
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Director Patrice Chéreau's French arthouse film, her first English-language film, was noted for extremely graphic and explicit sex scenes, heretofore unseen; in a dreary London, aspiring amateur actress Claire (Kerry Fox) was a married woman engaged in a series of once-weekly, Wednesday afternoon, emotionally-apathetic, physical encounters with emotionally-cold and lonely, divorced bar manager Jay (Mark Rylance); this film controversially revealed both physical, stark and hard-core psychological nakedness in their sexual couplings, with numerous, unflattering and raw, wordless sexual encounters including uncensored fellatio; it was notable as the first theatrically-distributed film to depict the act of fellatio |    |
| Iris (2001)
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Director Richard Eyre's multi-Oscar-nominated period drama starred Kate Winslet as young British novelist Iris Murdoch -- an exhibitionist and energetic, spirited libertine who frequently loved to go skinny-dipping in contrast to her virginal and stuttering boyfriend/future husband - fellow professor John Bayley (Hugh Bonneville/Jim Broadbent); later in life (portrayed by Judi Dench), she was ravaged by Alzheimer's disease |    |
| Jason X (2001)
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In one sequence, mindless killer Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) was tricked into entering a virtual reality simulation of "Camp Crystal Lake, circa 1980" (the setting of Friday the 13th (1980)) that was designed to distract him with new victims; there he encountered VR Teen Girl # 1 and 2 (Tania Maro and Kaye Penaflor) - programmed to be stereotypical "horny girls" who teasingly asked him: "Hey, do you want a beer? Or do you wanna smoke some pot? Or we can have premarital sex?" before removing their tops and giggling: "We love premarital sex!"; after they climbed into their sleeping bags, he beat them to death by bashing their sleeping bags together; the scene appeared to spoof the Puritanical idea in the entire series of slasher films that sex led to death |  |
Les Jolies Choses (2001, Fr.) (aka Pretty Things)
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Before actress Marion Cotillard won a Best Actress Oscar award for the biopic La Vie En Rose (2007) for her portrayal of singer Edith Piaf, she starred in this melodramatic French thriller in a dual role as Marie/Lucie, identical twin sisters in a love hate relationship that were complete opposites (for example, extroverted/introverted); when outgoing fashion model Lucie received a recording contract and then killed herself, her talented yet introverted sister Marie took her place, leading to haunting consequences; she appeared in a revealing love-making scene in the film |  
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| Kissing Jessica Stein (2001)
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This off-beat yet witty hit sleeper comedy made the point that lesbianism (and bisexuality) was becoming more and more acceptable (as lesbian chic) on screen; the story told about a romantically frustrated, young, single, neurotic Jewish heterosexual NYC copy-editor named Jessica Stein (co-writer Jennifer Westfeldt) who answered a 'Woman Seeks Woman' personal ad from a bisexual, sensual art gallery manager named Helen (co-writer Heather Juergensen) - the film followed their ensuing development of a relationship | 
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| L.I.E. (2001)
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Director Michael Cuesta's debut feature film - a low-budget, non-prurient, coming-of-age drama - was set in suburban Long Island; it told about a 15 year-old gay boy Howie (Paul Franklin Dano) who became involved with a well-respected, tough ex-military man and pedophile named Big John Harrigan (Brian Cox), who owned a bright red Cutlass with the license plate "BJ"; the daring, non-sexually explicit film received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA |  |
| Lost and Delirious (2001, Canada)
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This sensitively-told coming of age tale of first love was the debut English-language film of Canadian director Lea Pool; it was based on the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan - and was a heartbreaking story and depiction of unrequited, teenaged lesbian love; it displayed the passionate, physical and emotional relationship between schoolgirl roommates in a boarding school, between brash renegade tomboy Pauline 'Paulie' Oster (Piper Perabo) -- the 'lost' girl -- and the beautiful and voluptuous Victoria 'Tory' Moller (Jessica Pare); the film's drama of unrequited love portrayed Paulie as scorned and mentally unstable after Tory broke off the romance and pursued Jake (Luke Kirby) at a nearby boys' school |   |
| Lovely & Amazing (2001)
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In this dramatic comedy by Nicole Holofcener, Emily Mortimer starred as timid and insecure Elizabeth Marks - one of three daughters in a dysfunctional family; in one memorable scene, the body-obsessed aspiring actress left her shared bed naked and deliberately posed in front of egotistical, narcissistic, and callous fellow actor/boyfriend named Kevin (Dermot Mulroney) - as she turned slowly and asked for a candid evaluation and critiquing of the imperfections of her lithe body, he told her, reluctantly: "You ain't bad" |   |
| Monster's Ball (2001)
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Director Marc Forster's mainstream Oscar-winning film was remarkable for its sexual candor and intensity, displayed through sexual couplings to ease life's pains; Halle Berry won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of estranged African-American single-mom and waitress Leticia Musgrove, who became involved with hard-drinking, racist, emotionally-drained Georgia prison (death-row) guard Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton); in a scene of volatile, raw and intense inter-racial sexuality, the emotionally-devastated widow engaged in an animalistic scene of love-making (from behind, his accustomed position with prostitutes) before she begged him: "Make ... me ... feel ... good", turned him around, and rearranged herself on top; she also accepted cunnilingus in another scene |      |
HISTORY OF SEX IN CINEMA - INDEX (chronological by film title)
Intro | Part
1 | Part 2 | Part
3 | Part 4 | Part
5 | Part 6 | Part
7 | Part 8 | Part
9 | Part 10 |
Part 11 | Part
12 | Part 13 | Part
14 | Part 15 | Part
16 | Part 17 | Part
18 | Part 19 | Part
20 |
Part 21 | Part
22 | Part 23 | Part
24 | Part 25 | Part
26 | Part 27 | Part
28 | Part 29 | Part
30 |
Part 31 | Part
32 | Part 33 | Part
34 | Part 35 | Part
36 | Part 37 | Part
38 | Part 39 | Part
40 |
Part 41 | Part
42 | Part 43 | Part
44 | Part 45 | Part
46 | Part 47 | Part
48 | Part 49 | Part
50 |
Created in 1996-2008 © by Tim Dirks. All rights reserved.
