Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche fought throughout the shoot. Louis Malle declared it “probably the most difficult film I’ve ever made.” And cuts needed to be imposed to avoid an NC-17 rating. But all that friction only added to the ferocious great thing about this adaptation of Josephine Hart’s novel a few brooding British parliamentarian consumed by a clandestine affair along with his son’s libidinous girlfriend. Lust and contempt equally bond these lovers, leading to sex scenes by which it’s unclear in the event that they wish to fuck or destroy each other. Why is their attraction so twisted and unhealthy? Fascinatingly, David Hare’s screenplay leaves that query unanswered, forcing viewers to ponder the unfathomable nature of sexual obsession. —Tim Grierson

This early ’90s thriller gained cult-classic status through repeated late-night cable airings, and it still exemplifies an era of after-hours HBO full of sexy neo-noirs as a substitute of limitless Game of Thrones reruns. Based on a novel by Jim Thompson and directed by James Foley, the story centers around a punch-drunk ex-boxer (Jason Patric) who falls into the employment of a conniving widow (Rachel Ward) and a scheming ex-cop (Bruce Dern) as they embark on a half-baked scheme to kidnap a baby for ransom. The film seems cloaked in Southern California dust and suntanned sweat, and if Patric and Ward’s inevitable coupling doesn’t feel believable, that’s only because they’re in lust with one another, not love. Given the time of night most would have watched After Dark, My Sweet, that’s perfectly nice. —Mosi Reeves

Yes, Roman Polanski’s cruelly efficient satire about two couples on a cruise ship does provide lots of sex, courtesy of the voluptuous Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski’s real-life wife). But she and screen husband Peter Coyote are also very funny as they depict a brutally sadomasochistic marriage in outrageous flashback scenes, all which the wheelchair-bound Coyote recalls for the arousal of naïve cruise passenger Hugh Grant. Meanwhile, his wife (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) initially looks as if a spectator to those ribald conversations, at the same time as she grows disgusted at Grant’s pathetic flirtation towards Seigner’s free-spirited libertine. She’ll ultimately play a key role, nonetheless, especially because the film winds its way from farce and romantic turmoil to tragedy. —M.R.

Dark sexual desire infuses every frame of Pedro Almodóvar’s tormented tale of childhood innocence lost, which is ready in motion when movie director Enrique (Fele Martínez) reunites with Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), his past love from their Catholic boarding school days. Ignacio has written a provocative autobiographical story he’d like Enrique to adapt for the massive screen. There greater than meets the attention here, nonetheless. García Bernal has never been more seductive, and Almodóvar — very much in his kinky, down-and-dirty mode — luxuriates in his film’s taboo-busting audacity, whether it’s the cross-dressing, the outrageous twists, the condemnation of the Catholic Church’s in-house predators or the humid sex scenes. —T.G.

French filmmaker François Ozon’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel introduces us to Chloé (Marine Vacth), a depressed museum guard who starts meeting with a therapist, Paul (Jérémie Renier). He unlocks something inside her while taking her to bed …after which all of them lived happily every after, right? Not even close. Ozon pushes the fabric to the sting of ludicrousness — the twists are absolute doozies — however the filmmaking’s chilly brilliance and the actors’ red-hot sexual chemistry keep you riveted, ready for whatever outrageous left turn the story makes next. —T.G.

“Something to offend almost everyone,” wrote Time Magazine of a movie that shocked the censors, appalled the critics, and drew protests from gay rights groups convinced it might encourage hate crimes. If actual time hasn’t totally rehabilitated the status of the late William Friedkin’s seedy psychodrama a few killer prowling Latest York’s underground leather bars, it has thrown a floodlight on the sweaty urgency of its thrills, including a blood-freezing opening sequence of lust hardening into terror with the flash of a blade. Shining brighter still is Al Pacino’s simmering, ambiguous performance because the possibly closeted policeman playing prey to flush out a predator; taking his cues from the double entendre of the title, he blurs the road between duty and desire. A lot of movies follow cops who lose themselves undercover. Gripping because it is eternally controversial, this one gets its whole charge from the likelihood that the cop might find himself there as a substitute. —A.A. Dowd

High-priced prosecutor “Rusty” Sabich (Harrison Ford) is assigned by the district attorney to help homicide detectives in investigating the grisly murder of a fellow lawyer, Carolyn Polhemus (Greta Sacchi), who specialized in sexual-assault cases. There’s only one big catch: Rusty had been having affair along with his colleague, and when she had broken things off, he became a bit of aggressive and stalker-y. Which suggests — you guessed it — he’s not only a part of the investigation but in addition the prime suspect. Even in case you already know the twist at the middle of Scott Turrow’s best-selling novel, you may still enjoy the way in which that director Alan J. Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View) and cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather) turn what might have been a trashy thriller right into a high-pedigree courtroom drama. It’s the steamy-as-hell sex scene between Ford and Sacchi on his desk, nonetheless, that’s earned this early ’90s lawyer-lit adaptation a spot on this list. Yowza. —David Fear

“I am God,” declares Alec Baldwin’s sensible, smug surgeon — the massive punchline of a vintage Aaron Sorkin deposition. Years before he turned his attention to more highfalutin topics like politics, journalism, and the invention of Facebook, the West Wing creator cowrote (together with Scott Frank) this supremely unpredictable ménage à trois of a thriller, co-starring Bill Pullman as an educational blindsided by plot twists and a young Nicole Kidman as his shattered, litigious wife. Juicy monologues aside, the actual pleasures of filmmaker Harold Becker’s monument to misdirection are structural, not verbal: It takes the screenwriting equivalent of a god complex to unleash a serial killer on a sleepy college town, only to …well, let’s not spoil the fun. —A.A.D.

Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut is a robust contender for being the granddaddy of recent erotic thrillers — on the very least, it could possibly be credited (and/or blamed) for kickstarting a potent subcategory within the genre, i.e. a spurned woman turns psychotic. Eastwood’s late-night radio D.J. keeps getting requests for Erroll Garner’s jazz standard “Misty” on his show; eventually, he meets — and sleeps with — the listener (Jessica Walter) who’s been calling in for it. He views the connection as extremely casual. She doesn’t, alas, and when the person with the velvety voice tries to finish things, his superfan’s reactions range from self-destructive to homicidal. Long before she was the Bluth matriarch on Arrested Development, Walters showed she could channel a complete different variety of male nightmare made manifest. You don’t get Fatal Attraction without this. —D.F.

Consuming desire edges right into a desire to devour in Claire Denis’ mesmerizing cannibal erotica, which dips into the gruesome shock of the “Latest French Extremity” horror movement while channeling the swooning sensuality of the director’s other work like Beau Travail. During his honeymoon in Paris, Shane (Vincent Gallo) starts feeling the consequences of an experimental treatment for the human libido, but the previous colleague he tries to trace down is already coping with the advanced impact on his wife (a feral Béatrice Dalle), who has insatiable appetites. They’re just like the black panthers in Cat People: No cage can hold them back. —Scott Tobias

Within the Nineteen Sixties, sophisticated foreign-language movies had a status as a spot to see the type of sex and nudity that Hollywood only teased. And for his first feature, director Roman Polanski used those expectations to his advantage, making a taut thriller that delivered sustained suspense and the promise of something naughty, while also exploring heavy themes like paranoia and lust. The story is straightforward: A married couple (Leon Niemczyk and Jolanta Umecka) invite an unnamed hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) to affix them on a sailing expedition, where the 2 men compete to impress the woman, while all three of them are wearing revealing swimwear. The macho chest-beating is without delay amusing and scary, because the audience waits anxiously to see which two will tumble into bed together — and who will likely be tossed overboard. —Noel Murray

A few of the sexiest sequences in Paul Schrader’s portrait of a high-priced call guy barely should do with actual sex — though that’s definitely within the film. There’s an erotic aesthetic at play here, with Richard Gere’s Julian living a sexy life, from his Armani suits to his perfectly built body. But that pristine existence, funded by the services he provides to lonely, elite women, is punctured by twin events: His affair with Lauren Hutton’s alluring political wife and his implication in a disturbing murder. Schrader invites us to look at Julian’s life unravel, but he’s ultimately a romantic at heart, and it seems American Gigolo is less about sex than the soul. —Esther Zuckerman

Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel introduced the character of Tom Ripley, a con artist who would turn out to be a channel for his creator’s misogynistic impulses for many years to come back. Anthony Minghella’s film — the novel’s second adaptation after 1960’s Purple Noon — gives her antihero a soul, only to look at as he barters it away to survive. Matt Damon plays Ripley, an aimless young man who bluffs his way right into a job retrieving Dickie Greenwood (Jude Law), the rich son of a shipping magnate leading a decadent existence in Italy. Once there, Ripley’s gift for deception ingratiates him to Dickie and (most of) his friends. It also ultimately requires him to take drastic measures to take care of his cover. Damon plays Ripley as a sociopath struggling to rejoin humanity, inspired partly by an attraction to Dickie. His failure transforms the film from a clever, nasty delight right into a tragedy. —Keith Phipps

Beware the nanny that seems too good to be true — she may, actually, be attempting to wreck your life as a way of looking for vengeance for you busting her OB-GYN husband for assaulting you during an exam! Curtis Hanson’s domestic nightmare of a thriller pits Annabella Sciorra’s working mom against Rebecca De Mornay’s hired help from hell, with the latter slowly insinuating her way into the family while continually gaslighting her employer. Potential rivals starting from Ernie Hudson’s mentally disabled handyman to Julianne Moore’s suspicion-harboring best friend are sidelined or dispatched with altogether; as for Sciorra’s husband (played by Matt McCoy), he’s a primary goal for seduction. Funny how the nanny just happens to be within the kitchen wearing a sheer nightgown when he comes down in the course of the night. Or how she’s able to towel him off after a rain storm while wearing the only clingiest wet dress within the history of erotic thrillers. —D.F.

Cat People had already been a classic 1942 horror film by Jacques Tourneur, however it gets a fabulously lurid makeover from Paul Schrader. Nastassja Kinski plays a devout young Catholic with a deadly secret: Every time she feels any type of sexual urges, she turns right into a bloodthirsty black panther. Naturally, she gets a job in a zoo, and what a surprise — she bonds with the man-eating felines. It’s a family curse she shares her brother Malcolm McDowell, who also an unhealthy interest in his sibling. Kinski is basically soulful and relatable, getting in contact along with her panther energy, especially after she falls in love for the primary time. Will she sleep with him? Will she chomp and claw him to shreds? Like Travis Bickle, except more naked, she’s a Schraderesque loner torn between lust and rage, to the soundtrack of Giorgio Moroder’s eerie ’80s synths. David Bowie belts the classic theme song, a goth darkwave anthem where he yells, “I’m putting out fire with gasoline!” —Rob Sheffield

Since director Henri-Georges Clouzot selected to finish this film with a warning to moviegoers to not spoil its secrets for others, let’s approach this with caution. Set largely at a French boarding school of questionable quality, the film concerns a love triangle between three individuals who, by all appearances, despise each other: headmaster Michel (Paul Meurisse), his wife Christina (Véra Clouzot, the director’s real-life spouse), and his lover Nicole (Simone Signoret). Fed up with Michel, the 2 women concoct a convoluted plan to do him in. Part detective story (because of a fun turn from a rumpled Charles Varnel as a proto-Columbo), part hyperventilating thriller, and part ghost story, Diabolique gets its charge from the sleazy frisson between its desperate characters whose complex, sometimes conflicting feelings for each other make virtually every scene feel prefer it could end in murder or an embrace. Or perhaps each. —K.P.

Who else but David Cronenberg could take the erotic thriller to probably the most extreme levels ever depicted on screen. His adaptation of J.G Ballard’s transgressive 1973 novel is an unnerving depiction of a subculture of people that get turned on by automotive accidents. A married couple played by James Spader — the proper man to play an aroused freak — and Debrah Kara Unger dive deeper into this shadowy netherworld led by a cult leader-like figure played by Elias Koteas. Cronenberg makes the sex on screen feel by some means each mechanical and corporeal, fusing metal and skin in ways which are each tantalizing and deeply upsetting. You possibly can almost smell the gasoline fumes coming off this movie. —E.Zu

Not one has ever accused Paul Verhoeven of playing it protected — but he fully crossed the road with this 2016 movie, a psychological thriller so controversial it needed to made in France. Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert), the pinnacle of videogame company, is raped in her home by an unknown, masked assailant. She becomes each traumatized and obsessive about the experience, eventually engaging in a sexual relationship along with her neighbor (Laurent Lafitte) that toes the boundary between consent and assault. Despite its difficult subject material, Verhoeven and Huppert skillfully shift the film away from spectacle into a posh character study that asks uneasy questions on female empowerment. What does Michèle, whose carefully-organized life threatens to descend into chaos, gain from these encounters? In true erotic thriller style, there are a number of twists, including which person is ultimately on top of things. —Emily Zemler

Former sex employee Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) lands a gig as a maid in a Tokyo inn, where married horndog boss Kichiko Ishida (Tatsuya Fuji) gleefully molests his libidinous recent hire and kicks off a torrid affair of mutual oblivion. Controversy-baiting director Nagisa Oshima goes hardcore in his graphic retelling of a true-life 1936 crime of passion, which culminated in a dazed-and-confused Abe wandering the streets holding her dead lover’s severed genitals. Their appetite for one another is so voracious that Kichi licks her menstrual blood from his fingers and shoves an egg in her crotch, while Sada eats his pubic hair and forces him to mount a geriatric geisha — when she’s not threatening him with a kitchen knife in a fit of jealous rage. Unsimulated penetration, fellatio, exhibitionism, orgies, rough play, and greater than a bit of choking are all on the menu on this X-rated arthouse revelation of mad love. —Stephen Garrett

Pedro Almodóvar’s masterwork of erotic thrills turns Spain’s fanatical love for bullfighting into the catalyst for a psychosexual murder spree. Retired matador Diego Montes (Nacho Martinez) remains to be so hooked on the adrenaline rush of death that he masturbates to slasher-film highlights of brutalized women and makes his girlfriends play dead when he ravages them. Unbeknownst to him, Diego superfan Maria Cardenal (Assumpta Serna) seduces men just so she will fatally stab them within the back in a toro-erotic climax. Only for kicks, you furthermore may get Antonio Banderas as a young-buck virgin with burning sexual desire, nascent psychic powers, and a way of overpowering Catholic guilt that makes him claim credit for all of the bloodshed. Sex and death have never been so closely intertwined, because the Spanish director adds necrophilia, vertigo, rape, and an eclipse to the darkly funny — and surprisingly, a seriously sexy — concoction. —S.G.

Based on Daphne du Maurier’s short story, Nicolas Roeg’s slow-burning, subliminally constructed nightmare supplies the “erotic” on this thriller thanks to 1 hell of a sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, playing a bereaved couple mourning the drowning of their young daughter. (For years the artfully edited sequence has been the topic of speculation: Were the actors really doing it?) But there’s something sensuous and tactile concerning the whole enterprise, from the ominous cobble-stoned alleys of Venice to the ubiquity of the colour red, which Sutherland’s John, poking his head up from his work restoring a church, finally ends up following over bridges and thru empty streets to what seems to be his doom. —Chris Vognar

Equivalent twin gynecologists sleep with the identical actress, declining to say that they’re not the identical person. It feels like a setup for premium kink, perhaps a naughty sex comedy. But as usual, David Cronenberg has more in mind than mere titillation. Working from a novel by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, the Canadian body-horror maestro dives deeply into the symbiotic relationship between these physically indistinguishable but emotionally quite distinct brothers. Jeremy Irons plays each, using mannerism to fastidiously differentiate between the 2 characters, in order that we are able to tell one from the opposite at a look …not less than until their respective identities begin to blur together. Here, a sensational story becomes something more complex, more disturbing, more tragic — at the same time as it tosses those with a twin fetish a bone via the looming threat of some steamy Irons-on-Irons motion. —A.A.D.

Put aside its story of an enigmatic client recruiting a detective to analyze a nightclub singer’s disappearance — everyone who’s seen Angel Heart remembers the film since it features Mickey Rourke at his glinting-eyes debonair Eighties peak and Lisa Bonet at her Rolling Stone Hot Issue-era finest performing considered one of the wildest, most annoying sex scenes in neo-noir history. (It was so intense that the RIAA nearly gave the film an X rating.) British director Alan Parker specialized in steamy atmospherics and shadowy visuals, which served him well in making this gumbo of sex and evil that begins in Fifties Latest York, heads right down to summery Latest Orleans, and ultimately travels where few expect to go, least of all its viewers. —M.R.

Rookie cop Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) has barely been on the force for a day when she discharges her weapon while a stopping an in-progress robbery. Worse, the dead perp’s gun isn’t on the scene of the crime, which makes her superiors query her side of the story. Suspended from duty, she strikes up a relationship with a commodities broker (Ron Silver) …who, not coincidentally, stole the missing .44 magnum and has been using it around town, leaving bullet shells with Megan’s name on it. A movie that’s launched a thousand dissertation papers on power, gender and the potency of guns as phallic symbols, Kathryn Bigelow’s gloriously slick, impeccably stylish thriller isn’t afraid to tow the road between erotic and sick. Working example: That hot-and-heavy sequence by which Silver introduces the thought of including Curtis’ service pistol into the sex play. —D.F.

It has a ridiculously convoluted plot that not even Wikipedia can do justice: Banker and, uh, call girl Anne Heche by some means falls into the orbit of wealthy and creepy Christopher Walken, resulting in all styles of machinations that require several viewings to unravel. Among the many sleazy twists on display is a near-pornographic forced-sex scene between Heche and Walken’s driver Steven Bauer; and an infamous lovemaking session between Heche and Joan Chen that lasts nearly so long as the central act in Blue Is the Warmest Color. Yet despite those titillations — which ensured Wild Side got loads of late-night cable airings after Heche blew up within the tabloids as Ellen DeGeneres’ girlfriend — the movie resonates as a kinky, flawed gem, because of its breakout star and director Donald “Performance” Cammell’s dazzling eye towards characterization and camera angles. —M.R.

On a nude beach where men park, suntan, and cruise, Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) makes eyes with Michel (Christophe Paou), a handsome stranger he later witnesses casually drown one other man within the lake. The cold-blooded crime complicates Franck’s attraction. However it doesn’t extinguish it, even once a detective starts poking around and asking questions. Alain Guiraudie’s coolly, seductively menacing French thriller studies its isolated milieu with the marginally detached eye of a naturalist observing a closed ecosystem, lavishing special attention upon rituals of pursuit and foreplay. Some have read an allegory for AIDS within the film’s comingling of desire and danger, but Stranger by the Lake gets at something more primal and fewer specific, too: the timeless tango of Thanatos and Eros, and the way in which reaching for an additional can turn out to be a type of a murder of the self. —A.A.D.

Few filmmakers defined the erotic thriller like Adrian Lyne, whose sleek, stylish, sweaty efforts tapped into sleazy ‘80s and ‘90s zeitgeist like few others. Though he would make another (2022’s Deep Water), this potboiler from the start of the twenty first century appears like the tip of an era — an adultery drama that usually plays just like the hangover after an evening of bad behavior. Equal parts sensuous and sullen, Diane Lane plays a mother and wife (to Richard Gere, no less) whose scorching encounters with a horny stranger (Olivier Martinez) turn her perfect life the other way up. Lyne could’ve just made a gender-swapped riff on his smash hit Fatal Attraction, but this underrated contribution to the genre is a rather more nuanced and thoughtful tale that considers the implications of sin without soft-selling their pleasures. —Jason Bailey

The erotic thriller goes to highschool in director Roger Kumble’s deliciously lurid and silly tackle Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It brilliantly transports the sexual gameplay from 18th century France to the twentieth Century Upper East Side, and sets a bunch of hot nascent stars loose on the fabric. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Philippe are a conniving pair of step-siblings who lust after each other and make a bet that involves seducing the brand new girl at college, a virginal beauty played by Reese Witherspoon. Gellar is at her very best as horny mastermind Kathryn Merteuil, who can’t stop dipping into her coke cross necklace for a bit of bump, and the film leans into all the things gloriously scandalous, including the spit that lingers between Gellar and Selma Blair’s mouths of their infamous makeout scene. —E.Zu

This stylish mash-up of erotic thriller and police procedural brought Al Pacino’s profession back from the dead and made Ellen Barkin a star. A burnt-out cop (is there another kind on this genre?) is investigating a serial killer of men who place personal ads. So he takes one out and makes himself the bait, which is all well and good until sparks fly with a seductive vamp who soon looks like his best suspect. Pacino reminds you why exactly he was such an enormous deal within the Seventies, but the important thing to the image’s success is Barkin, who smolders like a house fire and, in probably the most memorable scene, takes charge of their first sexual encounter like a hunter teasing out her prey. —J.B.

Director Brian De Palma leaned all the way in which into his Alfred Hitchcock fetish with this raunchy pastiche of Rear Window and Vertigo, starring Craig Wasson as a neurotic out-of-work actor who uses a telescope to spy on a friend’s sexy neighbor. While Hitch’s Fifties thrillers could only hint at where one man’s compulsive voyeurism might lead, this picture lays all of them out in explicit detail. The hero becomes obsessive about two women (played by Deborah Shelton and a vivacious young Melanie Griffith) who bait and tease him, leading him on a tour through Los Angeles that winds from Beverly Hills shopping malls — complete with glass elevators, perfect for spying — to the porn industry. It’s gory, sleazy, completely over-the-top, and makes for an astute comment on the fakery of the movie business …and the way all of us love to look at. —N.M.

It’s all sun and afternoon-delight sex in St. Tropez for Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider), two gorgeous European layabouts borrowing a friend’s vacation home. Enter Harry (Maurice Ronet), an old friend of Jean-Paul’s — and an ex-lover of Marianne’s — and his nubile 18-year-old daughter (Jane Birkin). They’ve dropped by for a visit, and accepted an impromptu invitation to remain for some time. The stress between all 4 of those visitors soon adds a claustrophobic sense of humidity to accompany the French Riviera’s seasonal heat. It’s not a matter of whether something bad will occur, merely who will likely be the perpetrator and who will likely be the victim. Due to a recent restoration and revival run, Jacques Deray’s spirit-of-’69 thriller has gone from obscure cult movie to rediscovered classic. As as to whether the “erotic” tag applies here, well …in case you’re not hot and bothered watching two of probably the most beautiful people to ever grace a screen roll around half-naked next to an expensive swimming pool, chances are you’ll want to envision yourself for a pulse. —D.F.

Amy (Rosamund Pike) has gone missing, and it sure looks as if her emotionally aloof husband Nick (Ben Affleck) is behind her disappearance — but is he the actual villain on this relationship? Toying with gender roles and the unknowability of other people’s marriage, David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling mystery is savagely funny because it subverts expectations and shifts our loyalties. The erotic and the murderous are closely intertwined — especially when Neil Patrick Harris’ luckless supporting character gets drawn into the couple’s web — and Pike and Affleck are each terrific playing people who find themselves, in a way, playing people of their brittle domestic stalemate. In revealing what happened to Amy, Fincher peels back the layers of resentment that construct up after the “I do”s, exposing matrimony as one elaborate mind-fuck. —T.G.

Nearly a decade before outfitting a polyamorous Sharon Stone with an icepick, director Paul Verhoeven turned to his favorite Hitckcockian blonde, Renée Soutendijk, for what looking back looks as if a dry run for Basic Instinct — save perhaps for Christ getting stimulated on the cross. Sexual fluidity, castrating blades, and prescient visions all play a job within the story of a bisexual writer (Jeroen Krabbé) who falls for a thrice-widowed cosmetologist (Soutendijk). He starts to suspect that she killed her husbands …and he’s next. Within the drab port city of Vlissingen, Soutendijk pops in a red dress and Kim Novak hairdo, and Verhoeven likens her to a spider elegantly spinning its web. Simply because the writer dreams himself the fly, nonetheless, doesn’t mean he can wriggle his way out of it. —S.T.

Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas truly deserves his space within the Erotic Thriller Hall of Fame — the person penned Basic Instinct, Sliver and Jade! — and he established his bona fides early on with this key ’80s thriller, by which Glenn Close’s criminal lawyer comes out of retirement to defend Jeff Bridges’ newspaper publisher. His wife has been brutally murdered, he’s the prime suspect, and she or he’s determined to prove he’s innocent. The indisputable fact that additionally they begin sleeping with one another throughout the trial does muddy the waters a bit, after all — especially when the smitten lawyer begins to doubt whether he’s telling the reality or not. Director Richard Marquand keeps tightening the screws and turning up the warmth, while Bridges subtly weaponizes his beauty and laid-back, California-surfer-dude charm. —D.F.

French filmmaker François Ozon explores the lurid impulses that fuel dark storytelling on this randy Hitchcockian portrait of bestselling British mystery author Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), a middle-aged singleton tired of the “blood, sex, and money” formula fueling her stale success. So her publisher offers Sarah his villa within the south of France to get those creative juices flowing. The writer’s unlikely muse: Julie (Ludivine Seigner), the publisher’s promiscuous daughter. Her unannounced visit and parade of one-night stands makes Sarah each bitter and resentfully aroused, when she’s not rifling through Julie’s diary for story ideas. Tensions come to a head when their mutual lust for a handsome townie results in a steamy night at home, skinny dipping, and jealousy-fueled homicide. —S.G.

Based on John Lutz’s 1990 novel SWF Seeks Same, Barbet Schroeder’s dramatically unhinged film taught us that roommates usually are not to be trusted. Software designer Allie (Bridget Fonda), reeling from a breakup, rents a room in her apartment to Hedra (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who responds to an ad. Hedra becomes obsessively protective of her recent friend, going thus far as to masquerade as her to hunt murderous revenge on a horny boss. The film teeters between slasher and thriller — you won’t ever take a look at a stiletto heel the identical way again — and Hedra’s fixation on Allie is a puzzle you’d need a team of psychiatrists to decipher. Yet another excuse you must live alone. —E.Ze

Welcome to ground zero of the Drewassaince of 1992—probably the most shocking show-biz comebacks ever. Before this film, Drew Barrymore was a former child star in a serious profession lull when she took this role; since then, she’s never been unfamous for a minute. Director Katt Shea (a longtime Roger Corman collaborator) puts her grunge-era twist on a well-known story: a family unit gets invaded by a wild thing who wants in, regardless of who she has to kill. Drew plays a tattooed teenage crime wave named Ivy, who becomes best friends with gullible classmate Sara Gilbert. She works her charm on the mom (Cheryl Ladd from Charlie’s Angels!) and has sex within the rain with the dad (a never-slimier Tom Skerritt). Drew brings all her feral intensity, knowing this was her last shot; she went on to bad-girl roles from Gun Crazy to Mad Love to The Amy Fisher Story. —R.S.

Rita Hayworth once quipped, “Men go to bed with Gilda but get up with me.” In Mulholland Drive, Laura Harring’s character survives a automotive wreck with amnesia and takes the name “Rita” after seeing a Gilda poster, then everyone who goes to bed with Rita wakes up simply confused. Filmmaker David Lynch billed the image as “A Love Story within the City of Dreams,” but that undersells the mystery and tension that swirls around Rita and Naomi Watts’ character, Betty Elms. The 2 women visit the bizarre Club Silencio, an apartment that belongs to a freshly deceased mystery woman, and Elms’ couch, where they discover their mutual love. In true Lynchian fashion, all the things turns topsy-turvy halfway through — Harring and Watts transform into other characters, and there’s a love triangle with Justin Theroux’s character. “You would like to know who you might be, don’t you?” Elms asks at one point. But with a puzzle this elaborate, does anyone? —Kory Grow

Among the many OG pioneers of the erotic thriller genre, Hitchcock’s deep, dark dive into sexual obsession lets the viewer share within the mania of Jimmy Stewart’s helplessly smitten tragic hero as he subjects Kim Novak to the last word makeover (but only after she gets a head start within the transformation game). Working in the grey area between the death rattle of the Production Code and the birth of the rankings system, Hitchcock knew he didn’t need nudity or explicit set pieces to convey near-hallucinatory eroticism. Sex and death have rarely been so inextricably linked. Would there even be a De Palma or a Verhoeven without Vertigo? —C.V.

Stanley Kubrick’s final film was a sensation even before its release, with some rumors suggesting it is likely to be too hot for America’s multiplexes. And it’s indeed memorably steamy — a lot in order that its central masked orgy scene still gets parodied. But while it’s set in opulent Latest York apartments and mansions, the movie revolves a reasonably down-to-earth guy: a grumpy jealous husband (Tom Cruise in considered one of his subtlest, most fragile performances) who gets so flustered at hearing the key erotic desires of his wife (Nicole Kidman) that he roams town in a fog of arousal and envy. He’ll eventually stumble across dead bodies and underground sex soirées before running afoul of powerful people. Like the very best erotic thrillers, this one draws a direct line between sexual frustration and mortal peril. Just remember: Fidelio is the password for admission, however it might not be the password for the home…. —N.M.

Leave it to the sensible Jane Campion to make considered one of the neatest and most artful takes on the erotic thriller without losing any of the danger that makes it so appealing. Former rom-com queen Meg Ryan is Frannie Avery, an English teacher in a distinctly grimy post-9/11 Latest York, who collects words and phrases in her notebook. A serial killer victim’s severed limb in her apartment constructing’s garden draws Detective Malloy, played by Mark Ruffalo, to Frannie’s door. Their resulting affair as the specter of the murderer draws nearer is passionate and paranoid unexpectedly, and consequently distinctly entrancing. —E.Zu

Released during Brian de Palma’s incredible late Seventies-early Eighties run because the king of Hitchcockian adult thrillers, Dressed to Kill probably couldn’t be made today, not less than not on a multi-million-dollar Hollywood budget. Like Cruising, one other hot and controversial watercooler film released in 1980, it flirts with portraying non-heteronormative people as homicidal deviants, despite the fact that it’s not entirely clear whether the killer who slices up Angie Dickinson in an elevator is motivated out of lust or rage. As the only real witness to the murder, the director’s then-wife Nancy Allen gives a terrific Golden Globe-nominated performance, and the way in which she inhabits her role as a shrewd sex employee contributes greatly to a movie that slowly yet surely enraptures its audience in suspenseful twists. You wouldn’t call the film “sexy,” but there’s a relentless undercurrent of sexual tension throughout. De Palma excels at negotiating shades of human desire and torment, so while the story could also be distasteful to feminist-minded viewers (who singled out a scene with a conspicuously phallic drill as being particularly offensive back within the day), it’s also engaging. Deciding which side the filmmaker is actually on — the perverts or the normies — is an element of the intrigue and fun. —M.R.

“She’s evil! She’s sensible!” With these 4 words, Jeanne Tripplehorn doesn’t merely sum up the plot of Basic Instinct — she encapsulates the entire erotic-thriller philosophy. Director Paul Verhoeven and author Joe Ezsterhas kicked off a ‘Nineties’90s golden age for the genre with this trashy magnum opus, streamlining all of the E.T. tropes right into a glossy blockbuster. Sharon Stone is a seductive crime novelist who may or might not be a serial man-killer with an icepick under her bed. As usual for erotic thrillers, male vanity is a predominant character, here personified by two specific asscheeks and Michael Douglas’ dubious decision to wave them within the breeze. He’s the chump cop investigating her for the schtup-and-stab murder of a rock star. As for Stone, she revels in her shameless arch-villain top energy, leaving teethmarks everywhere in the furniture. In her most iconic (and oft-parodied) scene, she uncrosses her legs during a police interrogation, revealing that she’s wearing no underwear; Stone has often sworn she had no idea her vulva was on camera. She was paid $500,000 for Basic Instinct; Douglas got $14 million, or $7 million per asscheek. However it was her star-making role. And he or she’s great within the sequel — no, not Basic Instinct 2, however the spiritual sequel, the 1993 Ezsterhas-penned hit Sliver, where she’s an architect who yearns to walk on the wild side (“Forget Pavarotti, I wanna go see Pearl Jam!”). —R.S.

In Ang Lee’s tale of deception and betrayal set against the backdrop of Japan’s occupation of China, sex can function a type of deceit or the one moment of honesty between two people. It may be an act of violence, a type of play, or an expression of desire, oppression, or love. However it all the time means something, even when its participants interpret that something otherwise. Adapting a novella by Eileen Chang, the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon director uses frank sex scenes as an extension of the moral murk that envelops the film. Tang Wei stars as Wong Chia Chi, a patriotic college student drawn right into a resistance group attempting to assassinate Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a robust collaborator within the puppet government ruling China. Chosen to seduce Yee, Chia Chi becomes first a victim of his cruel impulses, then his lover and intimate companion; her confusing feelings eventually leading her to doubt her mission. The film’s as uncomfortable because it is explicit, a mix that saddled it with an an NC-17 rating within the U.S. and led to Tang being exiled from the Chinese film industry for several years. But its unblinking, complex, masterfully made depiction of how sex can blind those in its grips — lust not only tramples caution but in addition political ideals, friendship and all the things else in its path — has ensured its legacy. —K.P.

First seen naked along with his back to the camera, drenched in sweat after his latest erotic conquest, William Hurt is a delectably pea-brained sex object in Lawrence Kasdan’s seminal neo-noir. His two-bit Florida real estate lawyer Ned Racine is like a horny himbo version of Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity — and the Barbara Stanwyck on this scenario is the confident, husky-voiced Kathleen Turner’s Matty Walker, who sizes up her mark thusly: “You’re not too smart. I like that in a person.” Body Heat leans on the classic premise of a femme fatale duping a lover into bumping off her husband for money. Ned isn’t so silly or morally corrupt to appreciate that he’s not doing something improper; Matty simply overwhelms him along with her sexual wiles, which director Lawrence Kasdan stages with an explicit, plane-going-down intensity that makes Ned’s mistakes seem wholly rational. A future where Ned and Matty are free to perform nightly sexual aerobatics against the soft breeze and jangling chimes of the Florida coast sounds irresistible. If some wealthy stiff has to pay for it along with his life, that’s a comparatively small price to pay. —S.T.

A haze of humidity and sleaze looms over the Florida Everglades in John McNaughton’s 1998 thriller, a movie with so many twists you don’t know who’s conning who until the credits roll. Hottie highschool guidance counselor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) becomes an area pariah when two of his students — wealthy girl Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards) and trailer trash outcast Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell) — accuse him of rape. But wait! Not only are they lying, but they’re in cahoots with Sam to unburden Kelly’s mom of her money and interact in champagne-soaked threesomes. People get murdered (or do they?), and two local cops know that somebody is lying. It’s an erotic thriller that 100-percent goes there, fully embracing the sordidness of the genre with some memorable girl-on-girl motion in a pool as Sergeant Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon) leers behind a camcorder. Bacon once said that the script was “the trashiest piece of crap” he’d ever read, which is probably the best praise a movie like this might attain, and you may’t deny how unabashedly salacious Wild Things is. It’s still the form of movie that leaves you in need of a shower afterwards, cold or otherwise. —E.Ze

Possibly no erotic thriller has more of an enduring effect on culture (for good and in poor health) than Adrian Lyne’s ’80s landmark — even in case you haven’t seen it, you realize the beats. Married man Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas in his prime) has a superbly nice life along with his wife (Anne Archer), but starts an affair with wild-haired woman Alex Forrest (Glenn Close). She soon becomes unhinged and possessive; eventually, Alex boils a bunny. But to scale back Fatal Attraction to its elements is to suggest you’re missing the thrilling nuance in Lyne’s work. The final word undoing of Dan just isn’t that he starts things up with the improper woman — it’s that Douglas plays him as an egotistical idiot who can’t help himself. Meanwhile, though the name Alex Forrest has turn out to be synonymous with “crazy bitch” tropes, Close gives this spurned woman a way of depth by playing her as someone wrestling along with her mental health. The duo’s chemistry is indeed scintillating, after all, and after they collide it’s an ideal match of two people who find themselves their very own worst enemies. —E.Zu

John Dahl’s neo-noir extraordinaire dares to ask the query: What in case you took probably the most mercenary femme fatale in film history, and made her the hero? A praying mantis in spiked pumps, Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) manages a telemarketing firm with an iron fist; she also has her husband (Bill Pullman) stealing and dealing pharmaceutical cocaine from his hospital job for extra money. When he brings home the loot, nonetheless, it’s Splitsville for Bridget. Stopping in upstate Latest York on her option to Chicago, she momentarily sets her sights on a young, dim-witted stud named Mike (future director Peter Berg) who she meets in a bar. And suddenly, our opportunistic friend sees not only a patsy but an excellent larger potential payday on the horizon. From a rating so illicitly, after-hours jazzy that it almost feels like a parody of erotic-thriller music to Fiorentino’s career-defining performance, this high mark of the genre stays one lean, mean ’90s noirish delight. Yet what you almost certainly remember most about The Last Seduction is its centerpiece of a sex scene, a highly athletic endeavor that features Bridget calling the shots while clinging to a fence. Years later, Berg recalled that while he and Dahl tried to work out the right way to choreograph the sequence, Fiorentino listened patiently on the sidelines. Then, apparently already in character, “she threw down the cigarette, checked out me, told me to shut the fuck up, take my pants down, and stand up against the fence.” The remaining is, well, history. —D.F.

Park Chan-wook first made his name with violent provocations like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy. But when he turned his attention to Sarah Waters’s 2002 historical novel Fingersmith, the South Korean director delivered something not only daring but in addition shockingly erotic — a tale of perverts and sapphic hookups, ingenious double-crosses and true love present in probably the most inhospitable of environments. Set in Korea within the Thirties when the country was under Japanese occupation, the film follows Sookee (Kim Tae-ri), a phenomenal thief who teams up with a forger (Ha Jung-woo) to swindle an heiress, Hideko (Kim Min-hee). She turn out to be Hideko’s handmaiden, but complications ensue once the thief develops feelings for this isolated, unhappy young woman. Flashbacks, revelations and torn loyalties ensue. The twists never stop, however the film’s biggest surprise was that Park was able to dream so boldly, crafting a puzzle-box erotic thriller so entertaining, luminous and depraved that it signaled a recent chapter in an already-singular profession. He doesn’t skimp on his trademark bloodshed and virtuosic set pieces — it’s just that they’re now tethered to an achingly romantic drama that was easily the kinkiest movie on the arthouse that 12 months. —T.G.

It’s possible no two actors have ever shared more sexual chemistry than Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly do in Sure. From the moment Gershon’s ex-convict handywoman Corky locks eyes with Tilly’s slinking gangster’s moll Violet in an elevator, the fireplace between them threatens to burn a hole through the screen. Eventually, they’ll consummate their mutual attraction, in a sex scene of uncommonly unbridled passion. But even before that, their encounters quiver with innuendo and tension — a simmer of raw desire that elevates Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s tightly coiled feature debut to the highest of its genre.

Though it was The Matrix that will fully capture the world’s imagination, this was the movie that established the Wachowskis as gifted remixers. This ’90s neo-noir landmark is without delay classical and postmodern, feeding a scenario worthy of Billy Wilder (and archetypes of Golden Age vintage) through an explicitly queer lens, with probably the most frank depictions of lesbian love seen in a mainstream movie as much as that time. Working with a small budget, the filmmakers turned their limitations into strengths, constructing the suspense around an apartment setting as tight because the timetable. Once the ladies set their dangerous escape plan into motion, plotting to steal a satchel of embezzled money from Violet’s explosive mobster boyfriend (Joe Pantoliano), the movie becomes a breathless pileup of complications.

Yet greater than its cruel twists of fate, greater than its mounting obstacles, what drives this movie is the hunger its heroines have for one another and for greater than what life has handed them each. Loads of erotic thrillers labor to sync the audience’s libido to the characters’. Sure desires to plug us into their very souls. What could possibly be more erotic, or more thrilling? —A.A.D.