List of Best Mainstream Adult Movies

British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom (A Mighty Heart) updated the arthouse erotica of the 1970s for the mid-aughts by framing this roughhewn romantic tale as a mash-up of contemporary indie rock and explicit penetrative sex. Featuring live performances by Franz Ferdinand, Elbow, The Dandy Warhols, Primal Scream and others, the film is a fascinating, at times even enlightening consideration of how the arc of a relationship can be marked by its sexual encounters. And unlike most of its forebears, 9 Songs is genuinely interested in female pleasure, lingering longest — and most powerfully — on actress Margo Stilley's mid- and post-coital face.

Spanking? An unlikely relationship? Keira Knightley in 19th century gowns? Check, check, check. Set around World War I, Knightly stars as a student of Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) who associates pain with pleasure. After getting a nod of approval from his pal Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), Jung embarks on an affair with his student to learn more about human sexuality from a very, ahem, hands-on perspective. If you’re looking for some solid spanking, it doesn’t get much better than this, TBH

This South Korean Erotic Psychological Thriller was a huge hit worldwide when it released in 2016. It was based on the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and centers around the sexual story of a conman and an heiress.

This Spanish film explores the sexual intensity of a young couple’s initial days, followed by the realisation that what they share isn’t as meaningful as they thought. Basically the sex was great but there wasn’t much else there. Relatable?

Just a few months before Fifty Shades of Grey‘s release, Gone Girl shocked audiences with a brutal and bloody sex scene.

Long before Bella Baxter was exploring the masturbatory pleasures of the fruit bowl in Poor Things, Luca Guadagnino’s ravishing evocation of first love and sexual awakening demonstrated the succulent possibilities of a ripe peach. The intimacy between Timothée Chalamet’s 17-year-old Elio and his father’s grad student assistant, played by Armie Hammer, is more often suggested than shown. But that doesn’t make it any less palpable, desire infusing the air between them like the golden rays of the Italian summer sun. This was the movie that launched a thousand Chalamemes, notably one in which Elio weaves his way onto a dance floor to The Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” his sinuous moves suggesting an incipient mating ritual.

Last year's Palme d'Or-winning cause celebre, about a young French woman's (Adele Exarchopoulos) coming-of-age as she meets a more experienced lesbian (Lea Seydoux), has garnered both praise and criticism for its unflinching, explicit sex scenes and its generally positive portrayal of a lesbian relationship. Is this an honest look at the growing love and eventual heartbreak between two young women? Or is it compromised by the fact that it's made by a man, stars two heterosexuals, and features sex scenes that might be a bit too titillating? (Can it be both?) Regardless, this touching look at young women falling in and out of loves will be forever judged by one particularly extended sequence in which the actresses pleasure each other in various positions for a looooong time.

Long before he explored space in Gravity or the glories of long takes in Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón investigated the mathematical possibilities of a hot-to-trot threesome in this millennial sleeper hit. Though Ana López Mercado's ample bosom serves as the tantalizing bait for both the audience and her horny young traveling companions — Gabriel García Bernal and Diego Luna — it's the pent-up desire the boys have for each other that drives the story towards a very hot, very cathartic, and ultimately terminal group session at the end of the road. The long, lingering climax earned the film a release without an MPAA rating, so as to avoid the dreaded NC-17. It also made its two male leads stars.

When Brad Pitt, as shady cowboy drifter J.D., sidled up to Geena Davis’ Thelma in a parked Ford Thunderbird in Ridley Scott’s tragicomic feminist road movie, a star was born. Oozing breezily confident sexual magnetism beneath his aww-shucks attitude and down-home drawl, J.D. talks his way into Thelma’s motel room and the next morning proceeds to steal the life savings of her best friend Louise (Susan Sarandon), funds that the two fugitives need to flee to Mexico. As one-night stands go, it’s a disaster. But Thelma at least gets a shot of romantic adventure unlike anything she’s experienced with the infantile jerk she married, plus some tips on robbery that soon come in handy.

Before Andrew Haigh created the HBO comedy hit Looking, he made this movie about two men hooking up over a long weekend. What at first seems simply like a hot one-night-stand slowly grows into something more personal, with both men being frank about not wanting to be in a relationship yet talking themselves into a series of frank revelations and undeniable rapport. Along the way, the sex scenes become more explicit, with one shot involving a man ejaculating all over himself leaving little to the imagination. But the sequences are as intimate as they are intense, and we're invited to view the two men getting it on as an expression of deepening connection and desire.

Stanley Kubrick's swansong averted an NC-17 rating thanks to director-approved digital inserts that obscured pornographic acts during the much-discussed Venetian-masked orgy sequence. The scene still feels remarkably smutty, though the film's steamiest moment would barely qualify as PG-13. After each indulging in extramarital flirtations at a lavish holiday party, Tom Cruse and Nicole Kidman get high in their bedroom and talk about desire. Provoked by her husband's disbelief that she could ever be sexually tempted, Kidman parks on the carpet in white skivvies and delivers a jealousy-stoking monologue for the ages involving a summer getaway, a studly naval officer, and a purred vocal delivery. In terms of potency, Cruise's subsequent sexual odyssey pales in comparison.

At the center of Todd Field’s unsettling, darkly satirical peek beneath the tidy surfaces of American suburbia are the hungry extramarital trysts between Kate Winslet’s earthy, lustful Sarah and Patrick Wilson’s Brad (whose warm caramel skin tones should be against the law), while their spouses are off at work. Infidelity, of course, is nothing new in movies, but the sexual rebirth of a disappointed housewife while perched on a washing machine gave a whole new meaning to the spin cycle.

Hoping to sabotage Imperial Japan's occupation of their native China, a group of radical students recruit a beautiful young woman, Chia Chi (Wei Tang) to entrap and assassinate high-ranking collaborator Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). All goes as planned until they fall into a torrid, agenda-scrambling affair, which director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) explicitly depicts in all of its rigorous, almost scary physicality. The film earns its NC-17 rating both for the uncommon length of these scenes, and for how violent, and face-flushingly good, the sex seems.

Barry Jenkins’ transfixing portrait of three formative periods in the life of a Black gay man growing up in Miami’s poor Liberty City neighborhood during the 1980s crack epidemic is a nuanced exploration of identity struggle that unfolds like a melancholy mood piece. But just like the ocean breeze that blows in on a warm evening, it’s alive with the sensual vitality of self-discovery and romantic yearning. The young protagonist’s first sexual experience on a beach at night is a scene of aching intimacy, and although his encounter years later with that same adolescent first love stops well short of seduction, when the 1963 Barbara Lewis doo-wop hit “Hello Stranger” comes on the jukebox, you will melt.

As the title and pretty much his entire filmography makes plain, David Cronenberg has little interest in the romantic aspects of sex and is far more attuned to the baser instincts to which his characters are susceptible. That’s evident in the striking juxtaposition of two scenes here. In the first of them, in which Viggo Mortensen’s character is still passing as the small-town family man, he’s the passive partner, happily letting his role-playing wife (Maria Bello) take the lead in a cheerleader uniform and see-through panties. Later, when he’s been exposed as a gangland thug in hiding, their rough-and-tumble physical union blurs lines of repulsion and desire in a literally bruising session on the stairs. Disturbing, but unforgettable.

There's a kind of disorientation that happens when watching Gaspar Noé's Irréversible, in part because it's told in reverse. But also because it's hard to recover from what you're witnessing. The story itself is pretty straightforward: While at a party, couple Alex (Monica Bellucci) and Marcus (Vincent Cassel) get into a fight, so Alex leaves. But she's attacked on her way home in what is undoubtedly one of the most disturbing rape scenes ever committed to celluloid, and it goes on for 10 minutes (more than 10% of the film's full running time). When Marcus and his friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) find out what happened, they take to the streets of Paris seeking revenge for what happened. If the rape scene wasn't painful enough, we later get to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a fire extinguisher. Based on the audience reaction at Cannes, Newsweek film critic David Ansen predicted that it would be "be the most walked-out-of movie of 2003." Because it was released unrated (for obvious reasons), it only ever made it to a few dozen theaters, so it's hard to calculate.

The fact that Blue Valentine was originally rated NC-17 should give you an idea of just how far the movie goes when it comes to pushing the envelope (and, yes, that includes plenty of nudity).

Before he made 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen made this dark drama about a Wall Street sex addict (Michael Fassbender) as he goes through the motions of a life in search of the ultimate act of pleasure. Unfortunately, given that he looks like Michael Fassbender, such meaningless sex is all too easy to be had —and has a lot of it onscreen he does. In the midst of all the one-night stands, the visits to prostitutes, and the lunchtime porn binges, this poor, broken soul searches in vain to forge connections and heal psychic wounds. And in characteristic fashion, McQueen doesn’t flinch from the particularities or the textures of this world – the film is replete with sex and nudity (including the much-remarked upon "Fassmember"), none of it pleasurable.

French enfant terrible Gaspar Noe's virtual reality epic is a tripped-out journey through the beyond, in which a dead junkie's soul rises out of his body, floats across a neon Tokyo and returns to watch over the sister — a Tokyo stripper played by a very naked Paz de la Huerta — that he promised to never leave. And since this is a Gaspar Noe film,the soul's chosen method of reincarnation and reinsertion into life comes via a close-up of a penis as it enters a vagina – shot from inside the vagina – and a journey through the cervix. Wow.

Years after the existential provocations of Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci made this sex-drenched, surprisingly generous look back at the era of the French New Wave and the May 1968 riots. American Michael Pitt shacks up in a Paris flat with sensuous (and somewhat incestuous) twins Eva Green and Louis Garrel, and a variety of imaginative couplings ensue. In typical Bertolucci fashion, the possibilities of cinema and sex seem limitless – both liberating and terrifying — but the political turmoil of the world outside soon brings everybody back to reality. The film didn't do the kind of business that Last Tango did, but it was notable for being a rare instance where a studio-owned distributor (Fox Searchlight) was willing to go with the allegedly financially poisonous NC-17 rating.

Several explicit scenes including fellatio by Anastasia Sergeyeva and explicit masturbation by Ekatarina Rak and others (the latter performed for a live audience via Webcam; the (male) customer can be seen masturbating on a computer monitor in the background in one scene).

The final film in Lars von Trier's so-called "Depression Trilogy" (it was kicked off by Antichrist, which was followed by 2011's Melancholia) features what Fifty Shades of Grey would never dream of attempting. It focuses on Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the titular sex addict, who is telling the story of her life to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), a man who has taken her into his home after finding her nearly lifeless in an alleyway. As she tells him about her sexual exploits, he very helpfully relates these scenarios to fly-fishing and the Fibonacci sequence. The film was given an NC-17 rating, but von Trier decided to release it unrated and in two parts. If the four-hour "edited" version isn't enough for you, there's a five-and-a-half-hour director's cut.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a secretary to a horny attorney (James Spader) who develop a complicated, intricate sexual relationship with BDSM components being thrown into the mix.