A Surreal "coming of age" story like no other, this Czech Gothic dream-like fairytale is possibly the most lyrical film ever made. Valerie, a Czechoslovakian teenager staying with her grandmother while her parents are away has her first menstruation, triggering a series of interlocking dreams about lustful vampires who prey upon her youth. As she blossoms into womanhood, the transformation proves secondary to the effects she experiences when she puts on a pair of magic earrings. Now seeing the...
Middle-aged scribbler holes up in steamy Búzios to finish his book—and ends up finishing something far juicier with the forbidden nymphet next door. Mauro, a married journalist in his mid-forties, rents a beach house in the sleepy Brazilian resort of Búzios to escape his routine and complete a manuscript. Next door lives Alice, a liberated, solitary fourteen-year-old beauty spending time away from her parents. What starts as neighbourly curiosity blooms into an intense, all-consuming affair as...
A voluptuous innkeeper keeps her missing husband’s memory, several eager lovers and half the Po Valley simmering in this cheeky postwar erotic comedy. Miranda runs a country inn while waiting—at least officially—for Gino, the husband who vanished during the war. She has not declared herself a widow, but neither grief nor convention has persuaded her to live like a nun. Her regular lover is Berto, a handsome truck driver whose absences suit her freedom better than his jealous returns. When he is...
A London scientist and Yank student meet at a gig then fuck, suck and come for real through nine live indie concerts in this shamelessly honest 2004 look at millennial lust. You watch expecting another arty British wank-fest but Winterbottom actually went there and filmed two people having sex without the usual faked nonsense, matching the sweaty chaos of actual concerts to the sweaty chaos of actual fucking. Matt the glaciologist and Lisa the American exchange student hook up at a packed Black...
Emily Browning checks into a luxury brothel, drinks the tea and becomes every dirty old man’s dream—though this icy erotic nightmare is more disturbing than sexy. Lucy is a broke Sydney university student drifting through life with the emotional engagement of someone waiting for a delayed train. She photocopies documents in an office, serves tables, lets medical researchers push a tube down her throat and occasionally picks up men for cash, treating her own body like just another tool available...
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...
Lewis Carroll’s prim little dreamer tumbles into a horny ’70s Wonderland where every riddle is a double entendre and even Humpty Dumpty needs a helping hand. Bud Townsend’s 1976 film—specifically IMDb title tt0074113—is far more than a familiar fairy tale with random sex pasted over it. Alice is now a shy young librarian who rebuffs her randy mechanic boyfriend William, partly because she has swallowed the old notion that anything pleasurable must be wicked. Left alone with Lewis Carroll’s...
Zola gets the Cannon Films treatment: corsets, courtesans, dirty moving pictures and a Paris full of rich fools begging Nana to bankrupt them. Dan Wolman’s Nana—the 1983 film identified as IMDb tt0084387—opens in a decadent Parisian bordello called the Minotaure, where magician and cinema pioneer Mellies entertains wealthy customers with erotic shadow plays and primitive “moving photographs.” His star attraction is Nana, a seemingly guileless newcomer who soon discovers that desire is a...
A sunlit bourgeois paradise turns into a moral crime scene when a cool, successful wife takes one reckless step towards her teenage stepson—and keeps walking. Anne is a respected lawyer who represents abused minors, a poised professional able to discuss predatory adults, damaged children and ugly family secrets without losing her nerve. At home, she enjoys the expensive calm of country life with Pierre, her older businessman husband, and their two adopted young daughters. Then Pierre’s troubled...
A passionate love story set in 1895 Paris, featuring the Super Gorgeous Noémie Merlant ❤️🔥 loosely based on the relationship between 19th century authors Pierre Louÿs & Marie de Régnier. Marie de Heredia is clever, beautiful and born into a celebrated literary family that has prestige to spare but very little cash. Two poets circle her: Henri de Régnier, wealthy, respectable and painfully earnest, and his friend Pierre Louÿs, a handsome traveller, libertine and collector of erotic...
Two wicked governesses, one leering baron and a pair of respectable families ripe for ruin: class warfare was never so keen to remove its stockings. Set in France around the turn of the 1930s, Dressage follows Nathalie, the illegitimate daughter of wealthy financier Leroy-Murville, who has grown up scorned while her father’s legitimate child, 17-year-old Sophie, enjoys the privileges denied to her. At one of Baron Plessis du Regard’s cheerfully depraved parties, Nathalie announces a revenge...
A doomed-love legend, a Goan drug lord, an undercover priest and a wet-sari temptress collide in one gloriously daft ’90s erotic thriller. American naval officer Kenneth Blake arrives in Goa with his fiancée, Sally, expecting sunshine, sightseeing and perhaps one last carefree holiday before marriage. Instead, he meets Leela Miranda, a beautiful local woman who looks at him as though she has been waiting five hundred years—and, according to her, she has. Leela believes they are the...
A gorgeous road movie with a rotten engine: one cultivated man’s “romance” becomes a child’s stolen adolescence and a long drive into hell. Adrian Lyne’s *Lolita* traps us inside the polished, self-pitying narration of Humbert Humbert, a European literature professor who arrives in postwar New England and rents a room from the eager, lonely Charlotte Haze. He can barely tolerate Charlotte, but the sight of her fourteen-year-old daughter Dolores gives him a reason to stay. He renames the girl...
Three women, three eras, and three very bad days for the men foolish enough to mistake lust for control. Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Women is a three-part erotic anthology in which desire, cruelty and black comedy keep climbing into bed together. The first and strongest tale takes us to Renaissance Rome, where the beautiful Margherita Luti poses for Raphael while conducting her own affair among the ruins. Raphael spies, wealthy banker Bini peeps through keyholes, and Margherita quickly grasps...
A hard-nosed magazine queen turns men into beauty-pageant meat—then a proud lion tamer shows her that romance cannot be measured under studio lights. Elisabeth is the cool, ambitious editor of a New York women’s magazine, and she has a publicity stunt big enough to dominate Europe: a televised contest to discover the world’s “last romantic lover.” Tens of thousands apply, but only a handful of handsome specimens survive the selection process. They are judged by women and gay men, posed like...
A raw, funny and deeply uncomfortable Danish drama about respectable adults playing at madness—until one quiet woman forces them to face the real thing. Karen is eating alone in an expensive restaurant when a disruptive group of supposedly disabled adults turns the room upside down. One of them, Stoffer, takes her hand and refuses to release it, drawing her into their taxi and then revealing that the whole performance was an act. Curious, lonely and strangely unwilling to return home, Karen...
A frigid hotel inspector hunts for pleasure in Hong Kong, where seven-star luxury, corporate treachery and Noémie Merlant’s restless libido share one very expensive bed. Emmanuelle arrives in Hong Kong already having anonymous sex in an aircraft lavatory, yet her expression says less “mile-high ecstasy” than “another box ticked.” That disconnect drives Audrey Diwan’s sleek, strange reimagining: Emmanuelle can get laid, but she cannot quite feel anything. She works as a quality controller for a...
A married philosophy teacher risks his quiet life and career when a brilliant, troubled 17-year-old pupil draws him into a doomed and forbidden affair. François Hainaut is a stern, middle-aged philosophy teacher living a settled, childless life with his wife Catherine in Saint-Étienne. His routine shifts when he finds Mathilde Tessier, a frequently absent pupil, collapsed near a bus stop and takes her home. She lives largely alone, with a suicidal mother in hospital and a father in Paris, yet...
A married man's Parisian fling with a lookalike hooker spirals into grief-soaked obsession and suicide in this dreamy erotic tragedy. Sigismond Pons enjoys a passionate, idyllic life in the countryside with his lovely wife Sergine and their young son—until a business trip dumps him in Paris. There the square-jawed Joe Dallesandro falls hard for Diana, a high-class streetwalker who eerily resembles his spouse. He monopolizes her time, clashes with her pimp and takes a beating for it, only to...
A solitary sailor washes up on a tropical isle of nearly naked sirens who play, please and persuade him to forget rescue forever. In this 1979 erotic anthology Private Collections (Collections privées), three distinct tales unfold. The standout Island of the Sirens segment follows Benoît, a lone yachtsman who tumbles overboard and beaches on a lush paradisiacal shore. Spotting a playfully compliant beauty named Malinka amid the waves and palms, he scrapes away his SOS signals and surrenders to...
