Seven women, one ancient villa, no dialogue and barely a plot: David Hamilton turns a Saint-Tropez holiday into a sun-dazed, clothes-optional moving photo album. There is no point pretending A Summer in St. Tropez is a conventional drama. Over two lazy days, seven young women share a bedroom in a secluded country house, waking in a tangle of sheets before showering, breakfasting, dressing up and drifting into whatever amusement catches their fancy. They cycle along rural lanes, gather flowers...
A woman advertises for one very private kink, finds a willing stranger, and discovers that anonymous sex becomes terribly complicated once the heart checks into the hotel. Frédéric Fonteyne’s sly little romance begins after the affair is already over, with two unnamed former lovers separately answering questions about what happened. Their memories overlap, contradict each other and occasionally reveal more than either intends. She placed a personal ad seeking a man willing to fulfil a specific...
A festival weekend goes tits-up in Cologne, where monogamy meets amateur nerve, 1970s porn cheek and a very adult game of rock, paper, scissors. Felix and Emmi are a settled young couple from the sticks, comfortable together and apparently built for the straight-and-narrow life. Felix is meant to spend the weekend at a music festival in Amsterdam with his commitment-shy mate Kai, while Emmi stays behind grading papers. Simple enough—until Kai’s ineptitude brings the lads into the orbit of...
A sun-kissed Ukrainian stunner dozes on a deserted Italian beach and tumbles into feverish erotic dreams that leave her moaning and bare for all to see. In this breezy 28-minute Italian short, gorgeous blonde Yuliya Mayarchuk strolls onto an empty stretch of sand, slips into a skimpy blue bikini, stretches out and drifts off under the Mediterranean sun. What follows is a cascade of surreal, sensual dream sequences—random oddities giving way to hotter fantasies involving a strapping young lover...
Horny teen Philly gets the ultimate summer crash course in passion from Emmanuelle's Sylvia Kristel as his sultry French maid—until blackmail and fake death spice up their forbidden lessons. Fifteen-year-old Philip "Philly" Fillmore, left home alone in his wealthy dad's Albuquerque pad for the summer, is a walking bundle of raging hormones when glamorous new French housekeeper Nicole Mallow arrives. Chauffeur Lester quickly spots the lad's crush and pressures the illegal immigrant Nicole into...
Two strangers, one Roman hotel room, and twelve hours to strip off their clothes, their lies and perhaps a little piece of each other’s hearts. On the final night of their holidays, confident Spaniard Alba persuades Natasha, a wary young Russian who insists she is straight, to come up to her hotel room. Natasha nearly bolts before anything happens, then returns for the phone she has left behind—and walks straight back into the temptation she was fleeing. What begins as flirtation becomes an...
A seaside sex-therapy weekend turns into a dirty little madhouse, with Andrea True playing doctor, puppet master and possibly the most troubled patient of all. Dr. Miranda Woolf is a celebrated psychiatrist with an unusual cure for sexual dysfunction: take a handful of damaged patients to her coastal retreat, remove the normal rules and encourage everyone to act out whatever has been festering inside them. With her assistant Robin helping to manage the experiment, Miranda wastes little time on...
Sex, secrets and state power collide as Paris’s iciest madam discovers that even the rich and untouchable look nervous when a camera enters the bedroom. Madame Claude runs her luxury escort empire less like a brothel than an international intelligence service. Her carefully groomed girls entertain industrialists, politicians, princes and government officials, while Claude remains cool, discreet and firmly in command. Trouble begins when David Evans, a restless photographer sleeping with one of...
Medieval Naples becomes a filthy, funny carnival of horny nuns, cheating wives, false saints, grave robbers and ordinary folk grabbing pleasure while they can. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Decameron is not a tidy costume drama with polished nobles discussing love over silver goblets. It is a rough, episodic street feast adapted from Boccaccio, full of crooked teeth, bare backsides, sweaty bodies, religious hypocrisy and the cheerful knowledge that respectable society has always been a racket. The...
A broke aristocratic clan plans a respectable wedding, only for a horny family curse to crash the château with fur, scandal and one outrageous erection. Walerian Borowczyk opens with the graphic mating of two horses, so there is no mistaking the territory: beneath mankind’s polished manners, breeding is still breeding. At a crumbling country estate, the near-bankrupt Marquis de l’Espérance is desperate to marry his odd, hulking son Mathurin to Lucy Broadhurst, a wealthy young American whose...
A lost eye, a forgotten lover and one ravishing queen turn ancient Egypt into a compact cocktail of palace intrigue, sun worship and soft-focus sin. The story opens in 1912, when a mysterious stranger appears at an Egyptian excavation and leads the archaeologists to Nefertiti’s famous bust—beautiful, intact and yet strangely missing one eye. From there, the film slips into an extended dream of the fourteenth century BC, when Nefertiti is still Tadushepa, a young Mitanni princess in love with...
A virginal Eugénie enters a libertine’s boudoir for two days of philosophy, seduction and naked tuition—De Sade with the sharp edges sanded down. Aurelio Grimaldi’s film begins with the Duke of Mistival handing his sheltered eighteen-year-old daughter Eugénie over to the beautiful, calculating Madame de Saint-Ange for a rather specialised education. Madame intends to free the girl from religion, modesty and every other rule likely to interfere with a good time, but she has another appetite to...
A married couple invite a cocky hitchhiker aboard their yacht, turning a quiet sailing trip into a three-way duel of money, muscle, sex and wounded male pride. Andrzej, a successful middle-aged sports journalist, is driving to the Masurian lakes with his much younger wife, Krystyna, when a fearless young hitchhiker forces them to stop. Amused by the lad’s nerve—and perhaps eager to show him who has the better life—Andrzej offers him a lift, then impulsively invites him aboard the couple’s...
One late actress, one smug director and one stormy Paris night turn a simple audition into a wickedly funny duel of sex, power and surrender. Thomas is alone in a shabby Paris theatre after a miserable day auditioning actresses for his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s notorious 1870 tale of desire and submission. He is tired, arrogant and already on the phone telling his fiancée that no modern woman has the intelligence, breeding or sensual authority to play his heroine. Then Vanda...
Three women, three eras, and a trail of bruised male vanity: Borowczyk serves sex, revenge and black comedy with the manners of an art lover and the morals of a tomcat. Walerian Borowczyk’s 1979 erotic triptych follows three women whose names begin with M—Margherita, Marceline and Marie—and whose appetites bring trouble to every man foolish enough to underestimate them. The richest episode opens in Renaissance Rome, where Margherita Luti divides her attention between the painter Raphael and her...
A Swedish teen drifts between a soft boy and a sadistic pornographer with blackmail negatives, and can't tell her nightmares from her life. Gustav Wiklund's 1971 sexploitation curio hands us Lena (Christina Lindberg), a high-schooler stuck between her twerp of a boyfriend Jan and Helge, an older, depraved sociopath who has taken nude photos of her and uses them to blackmail her into servicing guests at his wild parties. Her parents are conveniently off on holiday, so the city is hers to get...
Sunny Spanish coast, a curious American girl, and an aristocratic couple with very bad hobbies — Jess Franco's slow-burn sleaze fable ends in blood and seawater. Forget the famous French novel — the title is pure bait. This one has little to do with Histoire d'O; it's one of Franco's riffs on Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom. Odile, a young American on holiday, spies on a decadent household — a wicked woman of title, her sickly, impotent husband, and their two servants — and gets pulled into...
A Paris photographer enters a velvet-lined world of whips, vows and ownership, where surrender becomes less a bedroom game than a dangerous proof of love. O is a beautiful, independent fashion photographer whose lover René asks for a rather extreme demonstration of devotion. He takes her to the secluded Château de Roissy, a private club where masked gentlemen rule and women are trained to obey. O agrees to stay, accepting ritual nudity, bondage, flogging and the loss of nearly every ordinary...
A jaded married architect falls for a fearless young student, then learns she may be his daughter—welcome to one of the Seventies’ most elegantly dressed moral nightmares. Giulio Marengo is a successful middle-aged Roman architect with a stale marriage, a pregnant daughter and the weary air of a man who has acquired everything except a reason to feel alive. While working in Florence, he meets Francesca, an adopted student whose impulsive manner and complete lack of embarrassment hit him like a...
A Cool, Darkly Funny and Explicit Confession in which the elegant young Joe treats sex like sport, love like a disease, and men like an endless appetite she cannot satisfy. Found beaten in a rain-soaked alley, Joe refuses an ambulance and instead accepts shelter from Seligman, a bookish, celibate bachelor who gives her tea, clean clothes and a bed. From that bare little room, the bruised middle-aged woman begins telling him how she became a self-declared nymphomaniac. Her memories take us back...
