The 14 Best Sex Movies of 2024

Queer

View full post on Youtube

In interviews, Luca Guadagnino has painted Queeras a rather straightforward love story, albeit one that explores “unsynchronized” love as opposed to unrequited love. But the movie itself is far more elliptical. Queer is based on the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name that went unpublished for decades before its 1985 release. It concerns Lee (Burroughs’ alter ego in his semi-autobiographical book, brought to life by a multivalent Daniel Craig) pursuing a much younger guy named Allerton (the cute-as-a-button Drew Starkey). Allerton voices his inexperience with gay bars, is often seen around the Mexico City setting with a woman (his girlfriend? wife?), and, for the movie’s second act, is offered a free trip to South America with Lee, as long as he sleeps with him twice a week. Whether intentional or not, there’s a sense of ambiguity regarding Allerton’s intentions. Is he into Lee or just taking him for a ride while swimming in free orgasms?

Conversely, Lee is clearly gaga for Allerton, and Queerdoes offer some potential confirmation of Allerton’s emotional reciprocation to whatever degree that it exists. The blowjob that Lee gives Allerton during their first encounter is ingeniously framed. (The camera is behind Starkey’s head, which is in the way of where his penis would be—but not blocking Craig’s head and eyes so that it feels as explicit as possible without, you know, actually showing anything.) Allerton comes in Lee’s mouth, which he then passes off to Allerton without protest. (Allerton jerks him off as an uneven form of reciprocation.) Allerton also bottoms for Lee, with no seeming issue. And in a moment of tenderness, Allerton offers his twin bed to a dopesick Lee as they stay together in a hotel. When Lee climbs in, Allerton puts his foot over Lee’s, a moment of intimacy that eclipses any of the sexual contact here. (Before hooking up with Allerton, Lee also hires a sex worker, played by singer-songwriter Omar Apollo, who goes full frontal, though he may have used a prosthetic.)

This is not your mother’s Burroughs adaptation. It’s not even the other Guadagnino film about an older-guy-younger-guy relationship, Call Me By Your Name, whose camera veered away during the man sex. What’s remarkable about Queeris the sex is both direct and integral to the plot. Creating something that is both raw and utterly lacking in gratuitousness is quite a feat.

Nosferatu

View full post on Youtube

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu isn’t exactly sexy in that it’s-1994-and-Tom-Cruise-and-Brad-Pitt-are-staring-deep-into-my-loins kind of way. It’s not going to make teenage dreams and inspire “Team Orlok” shirts. Will it even turn people on? Doubtful. There’s a hasty-clothed-sex scene between the movie’s central couple, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), who retrieves the vampire Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) from his Transylvanian estate, and Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), whose psychic powers seemingly conjure him before anyone in her German town is aware of him. Orlok and Ellen eventually spend some time together in bed. Erotic? Not quite, despite the copious sucking going on.

Babygirl

View full post on Youtube

In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, good sex isn’t a vague desire or even a privilege—it’s a right. Heavy breathing plays over the film’s opening titles and then, bam: a shoulders-up shot of protagonist Romy (Nicole Kidman), mid-congress. She’s on top and she’s working up a performative sweat. She finishes, or so it seems, and her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) says that he loves her. He falls asleep and she pads a few rooms over in their palatial Manhattan apartment, where she pulls up porn on a computer, masturbates face down, coming so hard that she has to bite her hand to stay quiet. That is what you call a fine how-do-you-do.

So begins a sort of odyssey to pleasure that in some ways calls back to another Kidman vehicle that was erotic yet didn’t quite possess the noir-ish flair or sustained threat of violence to render a proper erotic thriller: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Romy’s awakening is prompted by the onboarding of an intern to the ecommerce company for which she is the CEO. From the moment he steps on screen to calm an out-of-control dog outside of her office building, Samuel captivates Romy. Kidman is characteristically great in a versatile performance that finds her projecting steely business formal and then being a bundle of nerves as she gets in over her head with a guy she absolutely should not be having sex with. But it is Harris Dickinson’s performance as Samuel that’s the main attraction. He draws in by pushing away. He’s a stoic kind of dom, rarely smiling and so flat in affect that he’s practically begging silently to be unwrapped and explored to find his gooey center. Dickinson is a good-looking guy, but his turn in Babygirlis off the charts hot while simultaneously being a study in the performance of masculinity. He’s playing a guy who’s playing a dream guy. He knows exactly what faces to make—the concentration in his slightly knit eyebrows makes him come across as taking his game with Romy very, very seriously.

In terms of cinematic representation, there are radical things about Babygirl. Though Romy has a family, she’s not exactly punished for seeking pleasure outside of her relationship and on unethical grounds. In a moment of weakness, she reveals to her husband that she’s never had an orgasm with him, and that is truly enough to make her endeavors valid—even if her methods are messy (and run her the risk of losing her cushy job). In terms of sex-positive discourse, though, Babygirl says very little that’s new. Sex with Samuel is largely a game of submission (hilariously, their safe word is her husband’s name). In a scene indebted to ‘80s pop, he has her lap milk from a saucer (an echo of Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video) while George Michael’s “Father Figure” plays. As if that’s not on the nose enough, there’s a conversation later in which a character posits that “Female masochism is nothing but a male fantasy,” and Samuel quickly corrects him: “That’s a dated idea of sexuality.” It’s very Gender Studies 101.

As liberation-minded as the film is, there’s a lot here that will remind viewers of other movies, including the actual erotic thriller Fatal Attraction, Disclosure, of course, and, most redundantly, 50 Shades of Grey, which has the same kind of dark approach to eroticism sans thrills. The sex in Babygirlmanages to be both vivid and tame—Romy seems to come hardest when lying prone and being fingered, though this is largely related onscreen via strategic positioning (Samuel’s working of her in this position is blurred in the background). There’s some brief standing sex and another quick shot of her riding him while he’s seated. Most of the turn-ons offered and explored are mental, and Babygirlis ultimately more fun to think about than it is to watch.

Anora

View full post on Youtube

The importance of sex to a burgeoning relationship is something that mainstream movies have routinely glossed over. In Sean Baker’s Palm d’Or-winning Anora, sex is the only thing that its principal characters share for certain. Ani (an effervescent Mikey Madison) is a dancer at a strip club who gets commissioned by Russian rich kid Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) to be his beck-and-call girl for the week in a premise that echoes the 1990 rom-com Pretty Womanfairly explicitly. In fact, the negotiation scene is a carbon copy with higher figures—after Ani talks Vanya up from $10,000 to $15,000, she admits she would have taken the gig for $10,000 and he tells her he would have asked for $30,000. In Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts’s Vivian tells Richard Gere’s Edward that she would have done the $3,000 gig for $2,000. “I woulda paid four,” he says.

Much sex ensues. Reverse cowgirl, standing in the shower, doggy, jack-rabbiting on the carpet. The scenes are raw but brief. This is all to convey Vanya’s stamina, or lack thereof. At one point, Ani tells Vanya that their sex could “last longer and be better if you take it easy.” She wants to teach him, but he doesn’t get much time to learn. For even though he sweeps her away and it seems like their relationship crosses the line of business transaction into something that is precious and real, it’s all threatened when Vanya’s parents (the actual controllers of his money) get wind of their union. The last half of the movie is a madcap chase that Baker usually reserves for the final moments of his third acts. Anoraruminates for a while on the fleeting nature of the bond that its first half nurtures.

Watch Now

Joker: Folie à Deux

View full post on Youtube

Before Joker: Folie à Deux, it might have been difficult to conceive of a scene more miserable than that of mostly clothed, standing sex in solitary confinement. Well, Todd Phillips’s flop sequel to his 2019 smash not only conjures such misery, it luxuriates in it. What’s more depressing than the scene described above, which actually does take place between Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur and Lady Gaga’s Lee? Oh, only the rest of the movie, which perpetuates everything people hate about musicals and nothing they love. For much of its running time, Folie à Deuxgives its characters nothing to do but sing, and the songs don’t deepen the plot in the least—it’s standard jukebox fare. The sole (consensual) sex scene starts with her surprising him in solitary. (A guard let her in.) They begin to make out and she tells him, “Wait.” He looks down and sees she brought makeup. “I wanna see the real you,” she explains. She does a shoddy version of Arthur’s Joker makeup and then they make out. “Can you do it?” he asks somewhat limply. She can. She inserts him into her. The scene is mostly shot in a tight close-up of their faces gazing at each other. He comes in about ten seconds. It’s a bizarre sex scene in a movie that is bound to be a footnote in both actors' careers, but hey, this onscreen sex did give birth to at least one great tweet. So that’s not nothing.

Watch Now

We Live in Time

View full post on Youtube

John Crowley’s rom-dramedy is, at heart, a conservative cinematic throwback that systematically rescinds the progressive stances taken by protagonist Almut (Florence Pugh). She says she doesn’t want kids but eventually falls so deep in love with cereal peddler Tobias (Andrew Garfield) that she decides to spawn anyway, putting her health at great risk. (She forgoes a full hysterectomy after a cancer diagnosis and pays dearly.) Given the traditional streak, it’s hardly a surprise here that the sex is barely there—two scenes cut as soon as the action heats up, though there are some nuzzles amid sensual kissing.

Watch Now

Throuple

View full post on Youtube

It simply wouldn’t be an accurate depiction of urban non-monogamy if Throupleweren’t at least a little bit messy. Michael (Michael Doshier, also the screenwriter) gets involved with a couple that just opened up, Georgie (Stanton Plummer-Cambridge) and Connor (Tommy Heleringer). Immediately, there are hiccups—they all nearly pull out of their first hookup over jitters that are eventually smoothed out in conversation. The chemistry then proves imbalanced, as Georgie and Michael are drawn to each other in a way that Connor and Georgie aren’t. There’s so much buzzing around the three guys’ heads and lives that director Greyson Horst resorts to split screen—Connor catches Georgie jerking off to a picture of Michael, but instead of getting mad, Connor goes down on Georgie. In the other half of the screen, Michael is telling his best friend, Tristan (Tristan Carter-Jones), about “all these new feelings in my body.” Then Georgie sits on Connor’s dick and tells him, “Just to be clear, I do want to keep seeing Michael.” Okay! A small story about big things, Throupleis uncommonly naturalistic for intimate indie festival fare. It’s not extremely explicit (the first three-way hookup is portrayed in blue light with a reduced frame rate that mostly captures the action from the chest up), but it’s a movie less about the intricacies of the bedroom and more about their ramifications on the lives outside it. The endless talking about one’s situation that tends to occur when things open up is something that Throupletotally nails.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut

View full post on Youtube

At long last, a coherent(ish) take on the notorious Bob Guccione–financed 1979 biopic. Using hours of previously unseen footage, Thomas Negovan reassembled the movie to reflect the original screenplay written by Gore Vidal, much to the consternation of director Tinto Brass (who didn't like the officially released version, either). The new Caligula, which debuted at Cannes last year and in commercial theaters this year, excises the hardcore footage that Guccione inserted, but it doesn’t skimp on the sex. This contains an ocean of background nudity (and sometimes forefront nudity, as when Malcolm McDowell’s Caligula dances fully nude in the rain). As Caligula and Tiberius (Peter O’Toole) stroll through Capri, an orgy of frolicking and sex toys serves as the backdrop. At one point, Caligula has a threesome with his sister Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy) and future wife Caesonia (Helen Mirren). Talk about sister wives! A wedding starts as an orgy and ends with Caligula raping both the bride and the groom. It’s reliably provocative but rarely titillating—even the moans that score several of the scenes sound demonic and disturbing. This Caligula is more grotesquerie than porno—you can see why Guccione had the impulse to add real sex to the mix. Without it, the movie seems calculated to kill boners.

Watch Now

Love Lies Bleeding

View full post on Youtube

The year’s hottest movie so far simply would not work without sex. The against-a-pockmarked-wall grittiness of it grounds the film before more fantastical elements that transpire (particularly in the third act). Said sex is also shorthand for establishing the devotion between mulleted gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) and aspiring bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian), the latter of whom rolls into town with little more than some striped workout shorts and a dream. Director Rose Glass understands the erotic potential in gym culture—a montage set to German synth act Gina X Performance’s “Nice Mover” glides between Jackie going down on Lou with rigor and Jackie getting in a good pump. The sequence’s pièce de résistance features a slowed-down shot of Jackie drinking a protein shake that drips down her throat—as the camera pans down, we see Lou licking it off her chest.

The administration of steroids is the pair’s foreplay—as they’re still getting to know each other, Lou offers Jackie what she claims is some leftover juice. (Is that even a thing at a meathead gym?) Jackie hesitates but relents. “Where do you want it?” asks Lou. “In the butt,” says Jackie. Saucy! We see Lou penetrating her with the needle. They’re making out seconds later. The ensuing sex is sweaty and messy and lit with a through-the-curtains golden light that looks like the product of an eclipse (and, true to form, scored with another incredible, smutty synth track: Patrick Cowley’s “Mutant Man”). It’s like nothing else in the world exists but these two women and the pleasure they’re exchanging. Maybe the most erotic (and, in terms of sex onscreen, unique) scene occurs when Lou asks Jackie to show her how she masturbates. (“Do you put your fingers inside when you fuck yourself? How do you do it?”) Jackie’s standing and Lou’s at crotch level—the intimacy couldn’t be more direct. The sex in Love Lies Bleedingis intense, though presented in relatively short scenes. In this way, Glass distinguishes between explicit and gratuitous. The characters’ strong sexual connection is essential to understanding the choices Lou makes as Jackie’s ’roid rage has her spiraling out of control. Eventually the movie goes with her. We stay along for the ride because of the heat generated in the first act. Truly a master class in sex onscreen.

Watch Now

Birder

View full post on Youtube

Nate Dushku’s low-budget Birderfinds serial killer Kristian (Michael Emery) wreaking havoc while frequently nude at a clothing-optional queer campground. It features dicks galore and scenes of explicit sex—in a cabin, in a tent, on a river’s shore, in some forest dirt. The guys (and some girls) don’t cruise; they just do it. The casualness with which they discuss and engage in sex is something media rarely bothers to get right about contemporary queer life. Birderhas a rough-around-the-edges quality that, while sometimes at odds with contemporary notions of “quality,” harks back to the scrappiness of early-nineties new queer cinema. And like many of those now-classics, this is a movie that has as much to say as it does skin to show. The manner in which Kristian is able to move in on and exterminate his prey is a subtle commentary on the inherent vulnerability in anonymous-sex settings.

Watch Now

Last Summer

View full post on Youtube

Writer-director Catherine Breillat’s Last Summeris so French they should serve it with a baguette. It’s an obsessively nuanced morality tale featuring a knockout, sphinx-like performance from Léa Drucker as Anne, a lawyer in what appears to be family court, frequently representing clients who allege abuse. Despite her job, she’s a devoted wife of Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) and the mother of two adopted daughters. Her selfless sense of duty is challenged when Pierre’s seventeen-year-old son from a previous marriage, Théo (Samuel Kircher), moves in with them and…well, Anne would probably say he seduces her (a woman more than twice his age), but much of what actually goes down is up to the viewer to decide. What Anne does is legally sound yet ethically askew. Can a woman who has conducted a life so selflessly be defined by a single act of selfishness? Can good people do bad things, or do those bad things make them bad people? And Anne’s motivation is underplayed—we see her having sex with Pierre in an early scene, though she talks practically the whole time about an old guy she had a crush on in her youth. Is she dissatisfied? Bored? Keeping the fire going? This close to unleashing an inner bad girl just waiting to come out? Breillat has the good sense to keep this unclear.

Last Summer is a remake of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts. The predecessor was far more sexually explicit. Breillat’s sex is often shot from the shoulders up with a static camera. (The first time Anne and Théo have sex, we are focused on his face; the next time, it’s hers we watch.) Though the sex here isn’t explicit, this is a movie explicitly about the taboo sex that’s taking place between stepmother and stepson. Breillat doesn’t seem to judge Anne, but she does let her character sit and stew in her predicament for what becomes an uncomfortable amount of time. It’s an open-minded film that asks a lot of questions and seems specifically designed to avoid knee-jerk social-media judgments that are so common today. It’s not an erotic thriller, but it feels very much like the product of a sensibility rooted in the early nineties.

Watch Now

Hit Man

View full post on Youtube

Glen Powell is on the A-list precipice, so it’s refreshing to see him in roles with at least a bit of an edge. In Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, he plays Gary Johnson, a seemingly mild-mannered professor at the University of New Orleans who does undercover work for the cops, posing as a hit man for sting operations to effectively entrap people who want other people dead. He dissuades the arresting Madison (Adria Arjona) from pursuing her husband’s murder, and there starts an affair predicated on her perception of him as a bad boy via the character he’s cultivated for his job, Ron. In a nuanced commentary on the psychology of sex, Madison’s perception of Gary affects his performance.

“I was once told I think too much to be a good lover” goes a voice-over monologue. “She said exceptional sex requires a lack of thought, a certain amount of animal abandon. I liked Ron. He wasn’t a thinker. He was a doer.” And then Gary does Madison all over the house. The sex is brief and largely shot from the neck up, but it includes role play (Madison dresses as a flight attendant), lots of Dirty Dancing–esque postcoital pillow talk, and a scene in which Glen and Madison are intertwined and she pours wine from a glass on herself as he licks her. The chemistry between Powell and Arjona is undeniable. The section of Hit Manthat showcases several scenes of sexual encounters to underscore the importance of sex to their burgeoning relationship is something many movies take for granted. Hit Man could have gotten away with far less eroticism, but it’s better, hotter, and more realistic for going there.

Watch Now

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

View full post on Youtube

Joanna Arnow wrote, directed, edited, and stars in this indie-quirkfest throwback about a submissive woman named Ann who floats from dom to dom. What is she looking for? That’s the problem! The Feeling That…presents a sort of sub’s dilemma—as Ann explains to one date, she waits for other people to order when dining out so that she doesn’t order the wrong thing and find herself jealous when the food arrives. She’s that submissive. Having any kind of idea of what she actually wants in a relationship is too tall an order for her. Much of the time we spend with her is in the company of her dom Allen (Scott Cohen), who orders her to do all sorts of degrading (yet kind of dull) things, like lick his nipple and then run and stand against a wall repeatedly while naked. Disaffected masturbation ensues (one time, for another dom, in a “fuck pig” costume—a plastic pig nose, a bunny-ears headband, a ball gag, a bikini top, and bells on so that he can hear her going at herself) and perhaps the most awkward blow-job scene in the history of cinema. Ann finally meets a handsome, chill guy, Chris (Babak Tafti), whom she decides she wants as more than a sex friend and even starts to top him from the bottom, but, uh, don’t expect much satisfaction from this one. It would be unfair and cut audience empathy, as Ann certainly isn’t getting any.

Watch Now

Challengers

View full post on Youtube

The mere presence of sex onscreen was enough to make eighties and nineties cinema “controversial,” but by 2017 it was the absence of it in Call Me by Your Name that had tongues wagging—specifically the camera panning away from Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) as they consummate their simmering attraction. It was a conscious act of circumnavigation that director Luca Guadagnino was asked about for years: “To put our gaze upon their lovemaking would have been a sort of unkind intrusion,” he said at the 2017 New York Film Festival, for example. Still, many wondered if he, a gay man himself, was evincing a certain squeamishness toward gay sex, especially because the most explicit sex in the movie (a love story between men) was straight.

Challengers similarly skimps on sex, technically, but the effect is way less distracting thanks to the considerable heat generated by stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist. The movie gets about as explicit as having them kiss, though the kissing is deep and passionate enough to give the impression that both of these guys are truly into Zendaya. Each other? Not so much, but that’s kind of what’s so hot about it. In the flashback scene in which tennis star Tashi visits the hotel room of the decidedly less accomplished players (and best friends) Patrick and Art, she orders them to kiss, and they do. This does nothing to make things weird between them. (They’re comfortable enough that Patrick slaps Art’s boxer-clad boner after Tashi leaves him excited and unrelieved.) They continue their close friendship (so close that at times they have conversations with their faces inches away) at least for a while—eventually, Tashi comes between them. But the story is less focused on her individual relationships with them than the one the two men share.

Challengersis a movie about intimacy, specifically intimacy among men—which may include sexual contact but generally transcends it. It’s about the extent to which the guys know each other, the way they look deep into each other’s eyes, their warm dynamic, the brotherly love so clear that it doesn’t need to be spoken out loud. Challengers is not a sex movie by any stretch, but it is unmistakably sexy.

Watch Now