Entertainment Weekly Names 50 Sexiest Movies Ever

263   6.3   7.2 

''You kept touching me, feeling my thigh.'' ''But in a nice way.'' And so goes the banter between Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney in 1998's Out of Sight, as the two radiate cool yet red-hot sensuality in this steamiest of modern movies. It made Clooney a film star, gave Lopez her most well-rounded role to date, and, thanks to director Steven Soderbergh, features a number of scenes that belong in a Sexy Cinema Hall of Fame.

AFIoscar's rating:

155   7.9   8.1 

We all know offices are rife with romances, so why are there so few great films about them? Here's the best: Cary Grant — never sleeker — is a natty newspaper editor trying to woo back his star reporter...who's also his ex-wife (a raven-haired Rosalind Russell).

Sexiest Moment: ''Want my fingerprints?'' asks Grant when Russell accuses him of perfidy. ''No thanks, I've still got those,'' drawls Russell — yowza!

2133   6.4   6.4 

The power couple as action heroes: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made a movie about John and Jane, married assassins who must take each other out with really big guns, which ends up turning them on — on screen and in real life, as it happened.

Sexiest Moment: Angry, aroused, and armed to the teeth, they hit the dance floor to surreptitiously pat each other down. Quips hubby to his touchy-feely wife: ''That's all John, sweetheart.''

63   7.2   7.3 

A sultry noir dripping with sweat and sin. Kathleen Turner is the breathy dame who makes men who should know better (William Hurt) do stupid things.

Sexiest Moment: Surprisingly, not any of the R-rated ones, but Turner and Hurt trading innuendos at a beachside bar.

130   6.1   7 

There's something for everyone in this racy sports pic: Annie (Susan Sarandon), an aging groupie with sexual swagger and baseball prowess to rival the minor leaguers around her; Nuke (Tim Robbins), the rookie who ''f---s like he pitches: sorta all over the place''; and sly, sophisticated catcher Crash (Kevin Costner).

Sexiest Moment: Crash's ode to ''the small of a woman's back,'' ''good scotch,'' and ''long slow deep soft wet kisses that last three days.''

129   7.9   7.6 

You won't find a lot of overlap between lists of the scariest films ever and the sexiest. Nicolas Roeg's Venetian creepfest is the exception, thanks to an infamous boudoir scene with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. It's so suggestively edited that moviegoers still debate whether the duo were, in fact, actually getting it on.

Sexiest Moment: Um, that one. Definitely that one.

474   7.5   7.8 

Two teens (Diego Luna and Gael GarcÍa Bernal) say farewell to their girlfriends (in bed) and set off for unknown destinations with an older woman (Maribel Verdú) in the cross-Mexico road-tripper.

Sexiest Moment: A drunken, boisterous celebration escalates into a sensuous threeway. As Verdú heads south of the border, the guys unexpectedly — and passionately — kiss.

506   7.1   7.8 

Daniel Day-Lewis as hunk? Yes, indeed, as the long-haired, hard-bodied, often shirtless frontiersman Hawkeye who promises Madeleine Stowe's Cora ''I will find you!''

Sexiest Moment: At the fort, Hawkeye seeks out Cora, gazes at her with blunt lust, then leads her to a nook where they engage in a make-out session both intense and tender.

AFIoscar's rating:

41   6.5   6.3 

Is there a hippie hotter than Viggo Mortensen's Walker Jerome? With his tousled bedhead and give-peace-a-chance gentleness, the traveling blouse salesman gives Diane Lane's Pearl, a frustrated, married mother of two, her very own summer of love. Even the way he removes the price tag from Pearl's tie-dyed T-shirt — with his teeth — is a turn-on.

Sexiest Moment: Walker and Pearl get to know each other, nakedly, under a waterfall.

546   7.6   8 

Nine years after becoming lovers for one enchanted night, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) cross paths once again. His flight leaves in hours.

Sexiest Moment: After nearly 70 minutes of Parisian strolling and emotional confession, Jesse and Celine retire to her place. A song comes on the stereo and Celine does a sultry Nina Simone impression. Puckered lips, swinging hips — she seduces him. She seduces us. ''Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.''

AFIoscar's rating:

327   7.8   8.1 

An unusual, lovely romance between a Dublin street busker (Glen Hansard) and a Czech pianist (Markéta Irglová).

Sexiest Moment: While visiting a music store, they begin to improvise intimately on Hansard's yearning ballad ''Falling Slowly.'' That Hansard and Irglová were truly falling for each other while making the movie only helps.

53   6   6.6 

Life imitates art in this story of a sibling lounge act (Jeff and Beau Bridges) who gets upstaged by its new singer (Michelle Pfeiffer). The charming brothers are mere props after Pfeiffer shows up.

Sexiest Moment: Pfeiffer purrs ''Makin' Whoopee'' atop the luckiest piano in the history of film.

914   6.6   7.4 

Words are the vehicles of love for star-crossed Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), but this old-fashioned romance has its share of ravishing images as well.

Sexiest Moment: Dropping her cross-dressing disguise, Viola laughs as Will spins her to unwind the bandages around her chest. It's a giddy, tender scene played without irony.

AFIoscar's rating:

41   6.5   7 

The heated politics — and steamy weather — of 1965 Indonesia provide the backdrop for an exotic, quick-burn romance between journalist Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) and Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), a British diplomat.

Sexiest Moment: Finally done playing hard-to-get, Jill pours herself onto Guy as they drive away from a stuffy party.

263   7.9   8.3 

There's something perversely erotic (did Hitchcock do any other kind?) about helping your love marry into a Nazi cabal for the good of the world.

Sexiest Moment: Devlin (Cary Grant) and Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) stroll out on a balcony above a South American beach. They kiss, and don't really stop for the next two and a half minutes — smooching for two seconds here, three seconds there, embracing the entire time. What began as a means of avoiding censors became a master class in hotness.

147   7.1   7.3 

When the wife's away, hubby may stray...especially if Marilyn Monroe lives upstairs. Monroe's role as the seductive subletter who tempts married Tom Ewell during a Manhattan summer is sweet (they drink champagne and eat potato chips off the living-room floor) and spicy (she does a breathy rendition of ''Chopsticks'').

Sexiest Moment: During a walk, a gust from a subway grate tosses up Monroe's billowy skirt. She makes a giggly, mock-valiant effort to hide her assets.

782   7.7   8 

David Lynch's surreal tale of two Hollywood actresses sharing a passionate link in dual realities remains an enigma. But the explicit scenes shared by Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring require no explanation.

Sexiest Moment: Sweet Betty (Watts) invites amnesiac Rita (Harring) to cuddle, and their good-night peck leads to more. Betty whispers, ''Have you ever done this before?''

139   6.2   6.8 

In this twisty thriller set in the sun-scorched South of France, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) spends most of her screen time displaying her voluptuous, bronzed bod in a teeny bikini — or nothing at all. It's no wonder she helps uptight English novelist Sarah (Charlotte Rampling) enjoy a creative and libidinous reawakening.

Sexiest Moment: Sarah indulges in a fantasy in which Julie indulges herself poolside.

904   7.6   8 

This adaptation of the 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel is an inexplicit yet electrically erotic weepfest, thanks to the desperate longing exuded by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams.

Sexiest Moment: Seven years after their first attempt to have sex is interrupted, the pair finally, repeatedly, get it on in the mansion Gosling has painstakingly renovated as a tribute to the love he feared he'd lost forever.

AFIoscar's rating:

2922   6.7   7.3 

When Titanic exploded with teen girls, Leonardo DiCaprio got a lot of the credit. He's dreamy, sure, but it's his potent chemistry with Kate Winslet that sustains the movie as a romance classic.

Sexiest Moment: We're torn. Is it the scene where Leo sketches Kate nude, or the sweaty backseat sex scene in a car below decks that fogs up the windows?

AFIoscar's rating:

566   5.9   6.8 

In Sharon Stone's bad-girl breakout, she oozes kinky danger as ice-pick-wielding bisexual novelist and man-eater. Michael Douglas doesn't stand an ice cube's chance in hell.

Sexiest Moment: Duh. The interrogation.

AFIoscar's rating:

16   7.2   6.5 

Monsoon Wedding director Mira Nair tackles racism and romance in this Mississippi-set bayou drama. African-American Demetrius Williams (Denzel Washington) and Uganda-born Indian Mina (Sarita Choudhury) spark from the get-go, much to their families' dismay.

Sexiest Moment: Mina and Demetrius hit the sheets at a beachside hotel hideaway, the camera lingering on their entwined extremities.

187   6.7   7.1 

In refined late-19th-century New York society, one simply could not engage in extramarital affairs. And so would-be lovers Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) spend their lives pining for each other, unable to go beyond a stolen kiss in the back of a horse-driven carriage.

Sexiest Moment: Newland unbuttons Ellen’s glove and kisses her wrist, tenderly.

97   5.4   5.4 

Adrian Lyne’s stylish thriller about sexual obsession — and, of course, foreplay involving the contents of your refrigerator — hasn't aged very well. It now feels more art-directed than naughty. But Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger never looked more beautiful (blindfolded or otherwise).

Sexiest Moment: Rourke and Basinger going at it like jackrabbits in a rain-soaked alley after eluding muggers.

AFIoscar's rating:

88   6.5   6.4 

Some like it hot. Some like it rough. Others like it hot and rough, like Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange in this '80s noir remake: He's a drifter; she's a hostess who seduces him into offing her diner-owner husband.

Sexiest Moment: What starts as a knockdown, drag-out physical fight ends with Lange covered in flour mounting Nicholson on the kitchen table. They're cooking, all right — just not food.

573   6.9   7.2 

It may be a wartime tragedy, but the nine-time Oscar winner oozes sensuality. It's hard to say whether the doomed affair between Count László Almásy (Ralph Fiennes, at his hottest) and Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas, ditto) or the breathtaking cinematography (undulating Moroccan dunes!) is the bigger turn-on.

Sexiest Moment: Almásy and Katharine share a Christmas tryst to the strains of ''Silent Night.''

249   6.2   6.5 

Director Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, 9 1/2 Weeks) crafted this explicit, adulterous affair between a bored suburbanite (Diane Lane) and a bookselling lothario (Olivier Martinez). How hot is this film? The wronged husband — the shlub — is played by Richard Gere.

Sexiest Moment: Alone on the train, Lane alternates between guilt and giddiness while visualizing her first hedonistic liaison.

AFIoscar's rating:

48   6.1   6.7 

This hardwood romance understands that on the right woman, a sports bra is as alluring as anything sold at Victoria's Secret.

Sexiest Moment: In college, two childhood neighbors, tomboy Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and BMOC Quincy (Omar Epps), channel their competitive juices into a strip game of one-on-one enhanced by trash talk and hands-on defense.

AFIoscar's rating:

162   6.8   7.4 

It could've been just a very stylish male fantasy. But the Wachowski brothers recruited bisexual erotic writer Susie Bright as a ''sex consultant'' to help give a realistic edge to the romantic relationship between the lead characters: Jennifer Tilly's Mafia moll and Gina Gershon's ex-con handywoman. The result is full of ''nasty wet business,'' as Bright puts it.

Sexiest Moment: Tilly shows Gershon that she, too, is extremely useful with her hands.

51   6.7   7.5 

In 1910, a friendship between Cambridge school chums Maurice (James Wilby) and Clive (Hugh Grant) blossoms into what their professor refers to as ''the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.'' There isn’t much sex to speak of — at least not until Maurice meets the strapping gamekeeper (Rupert Graves) — but who knew repression could hurt so good?

Sexiest Moment: Alone in the dorms, Maurice and Clive stroke each other's hair before nuzzling into their first embrace.

24   6   5.9 

Richard Gere has never been sexier, and few actors, in any movie, have matched his smolder in Gigolo — all the more impressive given that he’s playing a prostitute.

Sexiest Moment: Gere has a couple of scorchers with Lauren Hutton as his favorite client. But their slow-burn first meeting, in a hotel bar, raises temperatures the highest.

AFIoscar's rating:

1137   6.7   6.7 

Before the Gossip Girls could even spell ''headband,'' the teens of Manchester Prep — played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon, and Selma Blair — were fornicating all over the Upper East Side in this Dangerous Liaisons remake.

Sexiest Moment: Vixenish Kathryn (Gellar) coaxes doe-eyed Cecile (Blair) to kiss her. Their lips part to reveal a strand of saliva that lingers as they pull away. Drool never looked so enticing.

AFIoscar's rating:

23   6.6   6.2 

Spike Lee's feature film debut — shot in romantic black and white and set to a sumptuous jazz score (courtesy of Lee's father, Bill) — focuses on Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a self-assured Brooklyn artist juggling three eager beaux in her quest to find love through sex.

Sexiest Moment: Among many, the first — with boytoy No. 1 backlit by dozens of candles — is by far the most intimate. You may feel like you're intruding.

175   7.6   7.4 

'Take off your clothes.'' The line is almost clinical in its simplicity, but when Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis) says it to a variety of willing women, it's as hot a proposition as they come. Tomas is at his most magnetic when enticing his longtime lover Sabina (Lena Olin).

Sexiest Moment: Wearing nothing but lingerie and a bowler hat, Sabina crouches before a mirror to admire herself as an aroused Tomas watches.

225   6.8   7.1 

A powder keg of pervy desire burns beneath James Spader's every interaction with a woman, whether he's chatting over chardonnay with Andie MacDowell's repressed housewife or videotaping her sister (Laura San Giacomo) describing her sexual awakening.

Sexiest Moment: Spader's interview of San Giacomo, who gets more turned on with every question.

1012   6.4   6.9 

What if, after your lover died, his soul stuck around to watch over you? The triumph of Ghost — starring Patrick Swayze as the spectre and Demi Moore as the bereaved — is turning that kinda creepy premise into something sad yet sensual.

Sexiest Moment: To the tune of ''Unchained Melody,'' Swayze and Moore get it on late-night at the pottery wheel. (Believe it or not, Moore's character was originally conceived as a woodworker.)

AFIoscar's rating:

300   8.1   8.1 

Hong Kong, 1962: Two lonelyheart neighbors (Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung) whose spouses are having an affair embark on a secret relationship of their own. But conscience and a true fondness for each other keep them from sealing the dirty deal.

Sexiest Moment: ''We won't be like them,'' Cheung moans after a chaste visit to Leung's hotel room. Sometimes what doesn't happen is just as thrilling as what does.

311   7.3   7.1 

Paging human resources! This tale of a self-mutilating secretary (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and the eccentric lawyer (James Spader) who draws her into a submissive-dominant relationship is the stuff that, in real life, would prompt the mother of all lawsuits. But Secretary is actually far more sweet than perverted — and easily the most titillating movie about typing ever made.

Sexiest Moment: Spader punishes Gyllenhaal's typing error by bending her over his desk and slapping her rump while she reads the offending letter aloud. The really provocative part? When their fingers fleetingly, gently touch afterward.

849   6.9   7.2 

A character is defined by what he wants...and what he'll do to get it. For Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), his greatest desire is to be as close as possible to Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), a layabout who makes everything — even tanning — an act of idle seduction.

Sexiest Moment: Anthony Minghella's film is infused with old-world luster and sultry jazz, but when Tom and Dickie play a simple game of chess — over a bathtub, with Law naked inside — every move is an advance and a rebuff. Nothing that steamy ever ends well.

AFIoscar's rating:

36   7   7.1 

''Anybody check you for a heartbeat lately?'' a man asks Linda Fiorentino's femme fatale Bridget Gregory in this film-noir revamp. While she may be lacking a heart, there's very little wrong with the rest of her body — as she proves in multiple trysts with small-town boy Mike Swale (Peter Berg).

Sexiest Moment: After a bout of vertical sex in an alley, the slinky sociopath dubs Swale her ''designated f- - -.''

495   5.2   5.5 

What's the hottest thing an onscreen couple can do? They can fight. Whitney Houston, playing a pop diva/movie star, and Kevin Costner, as her sullen bodyguard, do more than smolder and flirt. They square off like angry tigers, creating an aggression that whisks you right past the cheesy celebrity-stalker plot.

Sexiest Moment: Costner carries Houston out of a club-gig-turned-riot, as she throws her arms around her new caveman-protector.

354   7.4   7.9 

In their little pool of suburbia, tainted with sexual deviants and Internet-porn addicts, plain Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad the ''prom king'' (Patrick Wilson) regress into lovesick adolescence.

Sexiest Moment: Brad leers at Sarah and her red bathing suit, and her flirtatious touch steamrolls talk about the weather: ''Hot enough for you?'' she purrs.

890   6.4   6.2 

Arguably no movie has done more to light up the libidos of tween girls than the story of Johnny (Patrick Swayze), a Catskills dance instructor, and impressionable young Baby (Jennifer Grey).

Sexiest Moment: Baby drops in on a shirtless Johnny in the middle of the night and confesses her love (''I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I'm with you!''). Then the lessons really begin.

333   7.1   8.1 

You may wonder: What's so alluring about a giant ape dragging around the love of his life like a screaming Barbie? But Kong, a big lug possessed by l'amour fou, is as doomed as Romeo.

Sexiest Moment: In a once-censored scene, Kong fondles Fay Wray's Ann, strips off a piece of her clothing, and sniffs it. Then, like a kid, he tickles her.

AFIoscar's rating:

225   7.2   7.2 

There's nothing sexy about Robert James Waller's 1992 novella — 171 pages of literary saltpeter. So it's a miracle that the onscreen chemistry between Clint Eastwood's globe trotting photographer and Meryl Streep's shy farmwife winds up being so passionate, profound, and heartbreaking.

Sexiest Moment: A quiet late afternoon. Two total strangers making dinner together. Seriously.

70   7.3   7.2 

Ranch cook Tita (Lumi Cavazos) channels her forbidden love for her brother-in-law Pedro (Marco Leonardi) into emotion-inducing meals: Tears in her cake batter cause wedding guests to weep; enchiladas prepared in bitterness make her sister sick.

Sexiest Moment: Tita's luscious quails with rose-petal sauce give her unmarried sister an orgasm at the dinner table.

AFIoscar's rating:

71   6   6.8 

After a string of bad dates, neurotic copy editor Jessica (Jennifer Westfeldt) answers a personal ad and finds herself surprisingly drawn to the woman behind it: bi-curious art dealer Helen (Heather Juergensen). The only problem? Jessica's kinda straight.

Sexiest Moment: Hoping to get lucky, two lunkheads approach the ladies at a restaurant and proceed to extol the virtues of girl-on-girl action — all while Helen secretly fondles Jessica's thigh under the table.

33   4.7   5 

Not since Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise has a bare chest made such an impression: As Winston Shakespeare, Taye Diggs seduces the 20- years-older Stella (an ageless Angela Bassett) with his smooth Jamaican accent and equally smooth bod.

Sexiest Moment: The steamy post-fight shower romp — just one of the many perfectly choreographed sex scenes that made women everywhere want to jet to Jamaica to get their own groove back.

19   5.6   7.6 

The titular men (Ohad Knoller and Yehuda Levi) are sturdy Israeli soldiers stationed at an icy outpost on the Lebanese border. Like a less tormented version of Brokeback Mountain's Jack and Ennis, they keep their coupling a secret.

Sexiest Moment: The guys go at it, fully clothed, on a snowy hillside. Because we see mostly close-ups of their faces as they make out, joke, and laugh, what's sexy is their sweet delight in one another.

1607   7.5   7.8 

A band of 300 impossibly buff Spartan warriors led by King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) battle the Persian empire with swords, shields, and tiny leather codpieces.

Sexiest Moment: It depends on your tastes, really, so long as they aren't subtle: You've got a lithesome female Oracle gyrating in mystical mist, nude Leonidas making sweet love to his queen (Lena Headey), or just the truly awesome spectacle of Butler's abs.

AFIoscar's rating: