

It’s hard to imagine an erotic thriller becoming the highest-grossing film of the year in 2022, but in 1987 that’s exactly what happened with Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction. Stream on Showtime (or rent elsewhere) Body Heat Like La piscine, Shampoo features co-stars who had previously been romantically involved with Beatty and Julie Christie, adding an additional layer of sexual chemistry and, in this case, what-could-have-been melancholy. You get why everybody wants to sleep with him - and why that’s probably a bad idea. Though there are several sex scenes in this movie, they’re often played to somewhat comic effect the real erotic charge comes from Beatty’s undeniable magnetism. Already known as Hollywood’s most prolific womanizers, Beatty skewered his own celebrity persona - as well as that of larger-than-life celebrity hairdresser Jon Peters - in this tale of a hairstylist who can’t keep himself from sleeping with, or at least hitting on, practically every woman that he meets. In between these two poles of hyper-serious and hyper-commercial cinema, though, was Shampoo, a sex farce starring and co-written by Warren Beatty. When you think of American films from the 1970s, your mind probably goes to Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films or his friend George Lucas’ first Star Wars. Below, you’ll find a list of 19 films, from America and around the world, that make the argument for sex on screen - all of which are better and, frankly, sexier than Fifty Shades Of Grey. Hollywood filmmakers learned how to convey intense sexual desire without actually showing or discussing sex during the restrictive Production Code era of the 1930s to the 1950s starting in the 1970s, American film became franker and more sexual, and in the 1990s, the erotic thriller reached its apex. Read more: Shows & Movies Like 'Bridgerton' To Watch After The Netflix Seriesīut there’s a rich history of erotic desire on film - one that should be celebrated, not rejected. That percentage is the lowest since the 1960s.” And it’s not just the caped crusaders who aren’t getting it on: Film researcher Kate Hagen told Playboy in 2019 that “Only 1.21% of the 148,012 feature-length films released since 2010 contain depictions of sex. It’s no big surprise that people are turning away from onscreen intimacy in an era dominated by a movie formula as sexless as the Marvel blockbuster - in recent superhero flicks, protagonists might get a kiss, if they’re lucky.


If you spend any time reading about or discussing movies online, chances are that you’ve come across people arguing that movies shouldn’t have sex scenes.
