August 4th, 2020 | Updated on November 19th, 2024
Movies are an interesting pastime. Divided into multiple genres the viewer can choose which is perfect for them as per their taste.
Erotic genre is loved by many but generally, people are not sure which movies are the best in this category.
Not anymore as we tell you the best erotic movies that are worth a watch. If you would love to watch the same with your partner then you may choose any one of them.
The movies are a class apart and once you are done you cherish the experience for long. Not only that the impact of watching the movie lasts with you for a long time, making your life a little more romantic.
1. LA BELLE NOISEUSE
In 1991, the master French director Jacques Rivette released one of his most acclaimed works- the four-hour La Belle noiseuse.
It was a fascinating and unconventional examination of the creative process, about an artist named Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) who reaches the age of 60, and finds new inspiration in a young model (Emmanuelle Beart), much to the quiet indignation of his wife Liz (Jane Birkin).
Two years later, Rivette was asked to edit the original 240-minute drama down into a feature-length version that would be more palatable for mainstream audiences.
The result was Divertimento (its full title La Belle noiseuse – Divertimento). Released to U.S. cinemas in September 1993, it received much less enthusiastic notices from critics, a fair number of whom (see the Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby assessments) implored viewers to stick with the original.
Review: Rogerebert
Frenhofer, the great artist, has painted nothing for ten years. He threw down his brush in the middle of painting what was intended as his masterpiece, to be titled “Le Belle Noiseuse,” or “the beautiful nuisance.” His model was his wife, Elizabeth, who inspired the great period of his career. “At first he painted me because I loved him,” she tells a friend. “Then he painted me because he loved me.
2. THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT
According to this story of a woman not so much scorned as ignored, life in late 17th-century England among the landed gentry was not what it appeared to be on the surface. Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) is desperate to find a way to please her husband and win back his errant affections, and to that end, she coerces the draughtsman Neville (Anthony Higgins) into doing some drawings of the Herbert estate while her husband is away for a few weeks. She means to surprise her husband with the drawings.
Review: Empireonline
Peter Greenaway’s directorial debut can be enjoyed as a country house murder mystery with Restoration drama trappings, as a cocksure draughtsman agrees to a new job so that he can indulge in sexual favours with his female employer.
3. BODY HEAT
Lawrence Kasdan’s first directorial effort is a throwback to the early days of film noir. The scene is a beastly hot Florida coastal town, where naive attorney Ned (William Hurt) is entranced by the alluring Matty (Kathleen Turner in her film debut). Ned is manipulated into killing Matty’s much older husband (Richard Crenna), the plan being that Ned’s knowledge of legal matters will enable both conspirators to escape scott-free.
Review: Empireonline
Openly intending to reinvent the seething amorality of film noirs heyday in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Lawrence Kasdan gets his two key ingredients dead on: the cold heart of his screenplay and the sheer heat of his leading lady. It’s not for nothing that Kathleen Turner, who was making her debut.
4. EXOTICA
The action in this film revolves largely around the Exotica strip club, a faux-tropical hothouse where young female dancers cater to their customers’ sexual and psychological needs. As the film hypnotically unfolds, the relationship between troubled taxman Francis and young stripper Christina is slowly explored.
Review: Rogerebert
Sex for money sometimes conceals great sadness. It can be sought to treat wounds it cannot heal. I believe that may happen less in actual prostitution than in the parody of prostitution offered in “gentleman’s clubs.” Whatever is going on is less about sex than psychological need, sometimes on both sides.
5. NINA FOREVER
Holly wants to save Rob and has fallen in love with him. She is training to be a paramedic and works a dead end job in a supermarket where Rob is the only remarkable thing; lost and angry since the death of his girlfriend Nina. Drawn into a relationship, the first time they’re in bed together so is Nina. A tangled and bloody mess of broken limbs.
Review: Variety
While macabre love stories have become more frequent in horror cinema of late, notably via the mainstream success of the zombie-meets-girl romance “Warm Bodies,” “Nina Forever” still manages a certain degree of novelty as it charts a relationship triangle in which only two sides can count themselves among the living.
6. BELLE DE JOUR
Belle de Jour dramatizes the collision between depravity and elegance, one of the favorite themes of director Luis Buñuel. Catherine Deneuve stars as a wealthy but bored newlywed, eager to taste life to the fullest. She seemingly gets her wish early in the film when she is kidnapped, tied to a tree, and whipped. It turns out that this is only a daydream.
Review: Rogerebert
In the days after I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” another film entered my mind again and again. It was Luis Bunuel’s “Belle de Jour” (1967), the story of a respectable young wife who secretly works in a brothel one or two afternoons a week. Actors sometimes create “back stories” for their characters — things they know about them that we don’t.
7. SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE
Steven Soderbergh kickstarted the independent film movement of the 1990s with this landmark drama about the tangled relationships among four people and a video camera. John (Peter Gallagher) is an unscrupulous, self-centered yuppie lawyer with a beautiful wife named Ann (Andie MacDowell). Ann feels secure and well provided-for in their relationship.
Review: Rogerebert
The movie takes place in Baton Rouge, La., and it tells the story of four people in their early 30s whose sex lives are seriously confused. One is a lawyer named John (Peter Gallagher), who is married to Ann (Andie MacDowell) but no longer sleeps with her. Early in the film, we hear her telling her psychiatrist that this is no big problem; sex is really overrated.
8. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, the new film by Luca Guadagnino, is a sensual and transcendent tale of first love, based on the acclaimed novel by André Aciman. It’s the summer of 1983 in the north of Italy, and Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a precocious 17- year-old American-Italian, spends his days in his family’s 17th century villa transcribing and playing classical music. Elio enjoys a close relationship with his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture, and his mother Annella.
Review: Rottentomatoes
Sun drenched and hazy like a dream to pass along the summertime, Call Me By Your Name is a quietly romantic and gorgeous film, full of aching melancholy and subtle storytelling. It is a quiet and slow paced film, sometimes emotionally distancing.
9. THE HANDMAIDEN (AH-GA-SSI)
From PARK Chan-wook, the celebrated director of OLDBOY, LADY VENGEANCE, THIRST and STOKER, comes a ravishing new crime drama inspired by the novel ‘FINGERSMITH’ by British author Sarah Waters. Having transposed the story to 1930s-era colonial Korea and Japan, Park presents a gripping and sensual tale of a young Japanese Lady living on a secluded estate, and a Korean woman who is hired to serve as her new handmaiden
Review: Imdb
Park Chan-Wook explores the power of narrative (the way you tell a story and its ramifications), creating another astounding visual spectacle full of dark humor, sexual desire, betrayal and revenge, with intense performances and a wonderful production design, editing and score.
10. WEEKEND
Weekend follows Russell (newcomer Tom Cullen, Best Actor winner at Nashville), who, after randomly picking up artist Glen (Chris New) at a nightclub on a Friday night, unexpectedly spends most of the next 48 hours with him in bedrooms and bars, telling stories and having sex, while developing a connection that will resonate throughout their lives.
Review: Theguardian
“Weekends, like life, are short.” That melancholy reflection from Kind Hearts and Coronets does justice to some of Andrew Haigh’s unassumingly excellent lo-fi feature: a boy-meets-boy love story extending over a single weekend, and filmed with a kind of real-time realism. There is sadness here, as well as romance, and a sense that sexual experience is not merely exciting for its own sake, but an adventure in defining one’s sense of self
11. THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY
Day after day, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) act out a simple yet provocative ritual that ends with Evelyn’s punishment and pleasure. As Cynthia yearns for a more conventional relationship, Evelyn’s obsession with erotica quickly becomes an addiction that may push the relationship to a breaking point. (C) Sundance Selects
Review: Theguardian
The Duke of Burgundy is an S&M love story – and if you see only one S&M love story this month, choose this one, as it’s smarter and jollier. The setting is a rural region in an unidentified European country, possibly in the 70s, where a woman named Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) reports to clean the sprawling, ivy-decked mansion of the stately, commanding Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen).
12. STRANGER BY THE LAKE
Frank (Pierre Deladonchamps) spends his summer days hopelessly searching for companionship at a popular cruising spot on the shores of a lake in rural France. One day, he meets Michel (Christophe Paou), an attractive yet darkly mysterious man and falls blindly in love. When a death occurs, Frank and Michel become the primary suspects but they choose to ignore the dangers and instead continue to engage in their passionate and potentially lethal relationship.
Review: Rogerebert
“Stranger by the Lake” is the sexiest and most elegant thriller in years, and it’s a damn shame it stands so little chance of traveling beyond the niche of a “gay film” it will probably get squeezed into. This French movie, written and directed by Alain Guiraudie
13. THE LAST SEDUCTION
Bridget Gregory seems to have it all: beauty, intelligence and a marriage to Clay, a wealthy physician. But everything isn’t enough for Bridget, who persuades her husband to make dirty deals on prescription drugs and then runs with the profit. Now incognito in a mid-American small town, Bridget draws a naive local, Mike Swale, into a smolderingaffair. Passion, greed and revenge forge a desperate triangle between the three as Bridget draws her unknowing victims deeper intoher web of deadly deceit.
Review: Rogerebert
“The Last Seduction” knows how much we enjoy seeing a character work boldly outside the rules. It gives us a diabolical, evil woman, and goes the distance with her. We keep waiting for the movie to lose its nerve, and it never does: This woman is bad from beginning to end, she never reforms, she never compromises, and the movie doesn’t tack on one of those contrived conclusions where the morals squad comes in and tidies up.
14. BLUE VELVET
“Blue Velvet” contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it’s easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration.
Review: Rogerebert
The mid-1980s did not represent a golden age of American filmmaking. The great directors of the previous decade were not on top of their game: Marty was drained, Francis bankrupt, Friedkin burnt out, Altman washed up, Roman on the run and Spielberg, seemingly having peaked with E.T., was in his literary adaptation period.
15. DANGEROUS LIAISONS
Adapted for stage and screen several times over the past century, French author Francois Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel Les Liasons Dangeureuses was the basis for this Academy Award-winning Stephen Frears film. The plot is motivated by a cruel wager between the beautiful but debauched Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and her misogynistic former lover, the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovitch).
Review: Rogerebert
Adapted for stage and screen several times over the past century, French author Francois Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel Les Liasons Dangeureuses was the basis for this Academy Award-winning Stephen Frears film. The plot is motivated by a cruel wager between the beautiful but debauched Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and her misogynistic former lover, the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovitch).
16. LOLITA
With a screenplay penned by the author himself, Stanley Kubrick brings Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial tale of forbidden love to the screen. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is a European professor who relocates to an American suburb, renting a room from lonely widow Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters). Humbert marries Charlotte, but only to nurture his obsession with her comely teenage daughter, Lolita (Sue Lyon). After Charlotte’s sudden death, Humbert has Lolita all to himself — or does he?
Review: Empireonline
For the uninitiated, Lolita – a byword since the book’s publication in the 50s for any nymphet – is the story of fortysomething professor Humbert Humbert (Irons), an Englishman fixated on the lost love of his own pubescence, whose fateful attraction for gorgeous, pouting, gum-chewing 14-year-old Dolores “Lolita” Haze (Swain) is his undoing in a tragicomic grotesque odyssey of lust, madness and murder.
17. THE PIANO
Writer/director Jane Campion’s third feature unearthed emotional undercurrents and churning intensity in the story of a mute woman’s rebellion in the recently colonized New Zealand wilderness of Victorian times. Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), a mute who has willed herself not to speak, and her strong-willed young daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) find themselves in the New Zealand wilderness, with Ada the imported bride of dullard land-grabber Stewart (Sam Neill)
Review: Rogerebert
“The Piano” is as peculiar and haunting as any film I’ve seen.It tells a story of love and fierce pride, and places it on a bleak New Zealand coast where people live rudely in the rain and mud, struggling to maintain the appearance of the European society they’ve left behind. It is a story of shyness, repression and loneliness; of a woman who will not speak and a man who cannot listen.
18. Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN
Alfonso Cuarón directed and co-wrote this sexy art-house hit from Mexico. The funny and moving coming-of-age story centers on two immature teens who get an education in love when they take a sexy road trip with a liberated, unhappily married woman (Maribel Verdu).
Review: Slantmagazine
Alfonso Cuarón’s Mexican rendition of Jules and Jim is as playful and politically scatterbrained as Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague classic but has the raunchier upper hand: Oskar Werner and Henri Serre never would have thought of doing the horizontal tango. Best friends Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) bid farewell to their girlfriends after coordinated bouts of comic coition.
19. THE SESSIONS
Review: Theguardian
The Sessions is the remarkable true story of Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), a poet and journalist living in Berkeley, California, who’d graduated from the local university some years earlier and decides at the age of 38 that he wants to experience sex for the first time in his life.
Based on the poignantly optimistic autobiographical writings of California-based journalist and poet Mark O’Brien, The Sessions tells the story of a man confined to an iron lung who is determined – at age 38 – to lose his virginity. With the help of his therapists and the guidance of his priest, he sets out to make his dream a reality.
20. A BIGGER SPLASH
In A BIGGER SPLASH, rock legend Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is recuperating on the volcanic island of Pantelleria with her partner Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) when iconoclast record producer and old flame Harry (Ralph Fiennes) unexpectedly arrives with his daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson) and interrupts their holiday, bringing with him an A-bomb blast of nostalgia from which there can be no rescue.
Review: Rollingstone
Bigger Splash, the title borrowed from a 1967 David Hockney painting, is a spellbinding erotic dance set on the gorgeous Mediterranean island of Pantelleria. From the best villas, you can even see Tunisia. Everything in this movie is so ripe and voluptuous that watching it doesn’t seem enough, you want to take a bite out of it.
21. THE BLUE ROOM
Two adulterous lovers go from pillow talk to possible murder in this sexy, brain-teasing thriller. Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Grand Budapest Hotel) directs and stars as Julien, a middle-aged salesman embroiled in a steamy love affair with a married woman who, after a round of kinky sex, makes a startling suggestion. Suddenly Julien is caught up in a police investigation-but just what exactly happened? Based on a novel by celebrated crime writer Georges Simenon, this beguiling cinematic puzzle unfolds in an elliptical style that keeps the audience guessing every step of the way
Review: Empireonline
When the prolific Belgian author Georges Simenon published this simmering psychological thriller in 1964, French culture was in thrall to the nouveau roman and the nouvelle vague. With its fragmented structure, elliptical editing and forensic dissection of bourgeois morality, it could easily have been filmed in lowering monochrome by Alain Resnais or Claude Chabrol.
22. BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR centers on a 15-year-old girl named Adèle (Exarchopoulos) who is climbing to adulthood and dreams of experiencing her first love. A handsome male classmate falls for her hard, but an unsettling erotic reverie upsets the romance before it begins. Adèle imagines that the mysterious, blue-haired girl she encountered in the street slips into her bed and possesses her with an overwhelming pleasure.
Review: Rogerebert
First loves are always the same and always different. The audacity of director Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is The Warmest Color” lies not so much in the fact that it tells the story of a same-sex first love than in that it tells this story in what some would consider epic detail. The cockeyed open-heartedness of Kechiche’s conception yields a girl-meets-girl-and-so-on story of three hours.
23. VENUS IN FUR
Based on the Tony Award-winning Broadway play by David Ives, which itself was based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s groundbreaking novella, VENUS IN FUR is the latest film from master filmmaker Roman Polanski. Alone in a Paris theater after a long day of auditioning actresses for his new play.
Review: Vulture
It’s not hard to guess why Roman Polanski was moved to make a film of David Ives’s brilliantly silly play Venus in Fur. The tale of an arrogant male writer-director who’s increasingly emasculated by an auditioning actress, the project offers a juicy role for his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, and an opportunity for him—given his resemblance to actor Mathieu Amalric—to stylize his own comeuppance.
24. Cook-Thief-Wife And Her Lover
This is probably Peter Greenaway’s most famous (or infamous) film, which first shocked audiences at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival and then on both sides of the Atlantic. A gang leader (Michael Gambon), accompanied by his wife (Helen Mirren) and his associates, entertains himself every night in a fancy French restaurant that he has recently bought.
Review: Empireonline
It comes as no surprise to learn that it took director Peter Greenaway a very long time to find a film company that would consider his script for more than 30 seconds, since the film opens with a close-up of dogs gorging on hunks of bloody carcass and then pans to the Thief (Gambon) force-feeding dogshit to a naked man.
25. Bound
Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly nearly set the screen on fire in this clever, female-powered twist on the standard Mob caper film. Gershon is Corky, an ex-con renovating the apartment next door to where Tilly’s Violet lives. Violet is the moll of psychotic gangster Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), who uses the apartment as an occasional location for meetings and beatings, and also uses Violet as an occasional plaything for his Mob cronies.
Review: Empireonline
This has exactly the plot which served in such films noirs as Out Of The Dark and Angel Face. And Jennifer Tilly, with her oriental eyes, Monroe voice, purple lipstick and sheath dresses, is a perfect modern equivalent for the man-traps who used to be played by Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Greer or Jean Simmons.
26. BLUE VALENTINE
A complex portrait of a contemporary American marriage, “Blue Valentine” tells the story of David and Cindy, a couple who have been together for several years but who are at an impasse in their relationship. While Cindy has blossomed into a woman with opportunities and options, David is still the same person he was when they met, and he is unable to accept either Cindy’s growth or his lack of it.
Review: NPR
Going back and forth in time, crossing strand over agonizing strand, Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine follows a volatile relationship as it flowers in the past and wilts in the present, looking for clues about what went wrong. It sounds like the cruelest sort of dissection, like pulling a butterfly apart by its wings, but Cianfrance and his actors, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, have not made a cold or schematic film.
27. PROFESSOR MARSTON & THE WONDER WOMEN
In a superhero origin tale unlike any other, the film is the incredible true story of what inspired Harvard psychologist Dr. William Moulton Marston to create the iconic Wonder Woman character in the 1940’s. While Marston’s feminist superhero was criticized by censors for her ‘sexual perversity’, he was keeping a secret that could have destroyed him. Marston’s muses for the Wonder Woman character were his wife Elizabeth Marston and their lover Olive Byrne.
Review: NYTimes
“Professor Marston” is another reminder that once upon a time people had sexual appetites and relationships as complex as those of today (or of 18th-century France), something else the movies don’t always like to admit.
28. IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES
Based upon a true incident in 1930s Japan, Nagisa Oshima’s controversial film effectively skirts the borderline between pornography and art — making Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris of four years earlier look like children’s programming in comparison. The story concerns servant and former prostitute Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) who becomes sexually obsessed with her employer Kizicho (Tatsuya Fuji), a businessman, after seeing him making love to his wife.
Review: Filmcomment
In the Realm of the Senses (Ai No Corrida, 76) reconstructs the relationship between Sada and Kichi, from its beginnings with Sada’s arrival as a new employee at Kichi’s inn, to its triumphant, convulsive end. Virtually all the film’s action takes place within a “closed” world of eroticism: every scene either depicts or relates directly to sexual love.
29. THE UNTAMED (LA REGIÓN SALVAJE)
Alejandra is a young mother and housewife who raises her children with her husband Angel in a small town. His brother Fabian is a nurse at a local hospital. Their provincial lives are altered with the arrival of the mysterious Veronica. Sex and love are fragile in certain regions where family values exist and hypocrisy, homophobia, and sexism are strong. Veronica convinces them that in the nearby forest, in a secluded cabin.
Review: Hollywoodreporter
What will give you the most intense sexual pleasure, might possibly do you serious harm and — get this — has more slithery tentacles than you can shake a stick at? After having seen The Untamed (La region salvaje), the surprising and disturbing fourth feature from Mexico’s Amat Escalante, it is clear where the answer to this question resides — in a cabin in the Guanajuato countryside, of course — and more or less what it does.
30. UNE LIAISON PORNOGRAPHIQUE (AN AFFAIR OF LOVE) (A PORNOGRAPHIC AFFAIR)
In this tantalizing drama, Nathalie Baye and Sergi Lopez give heartfelt performances as lovers who meet through a personal ad and adjourn to a Paris hotel to act out their sexual fantasies. But the couple’s weekly rendezvous leads to something deeper and more emotional, and they find themselves in a situation for which neither is prepared.
Review: Timeout
Presented in that already dated pseudo-documentary style, wherein interviews give rise to unreliable flashbacks, this teasing adult movie purports to dissect a relationship between two apparently respectable, middle-aged Parisians who share a very peculiar fetish. He (López) responds to a lonely hearts ad that she (Baye) placed in the paper, or was it on the Internet.
31. UNDER THE SKIN
From visionary director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth) comes a stunning career transformation, a masterpiece of existential science fiction that journeys to the heart of what it means to be human, extraterrestrial–or something in between. A voluptuous woman of unknown origin (Scarlett Johansson) combs the highways in search of isolated or forsaken men, luring a succession of lost souls into an otherworldly lair. They are seduced, stripped of their humanity, and never heard from again.
Review: Rogerebert
Is “Under the Skin,” in which Scarlett Johansson plays a mysterious woman luring men into a fatal mating dance, a brilliant science fiction movie—more of an “experience” than a traditional story, with plenty to say about gender roles, sexism and the power of lust? Is it a pretentious gloss on a very old story about men’s fear of women.
32. LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Bernardo Bertolucci’s art-house classic, Marlon Brando delivers one of his characteristically idiosyncratic performances as Paul, a middle-aged American in “emotional exile” who comes to Paris when his estranged wife commits suicide. Chancing to meet young Frenchwoman Jeanne (Maria Schneider), Paul enters into a sadomasochistic, carnal relationship with her, indirectly attacking the hypocrisy all around him through his raw, outrageous sexual behavior.
Review: Newyorker
The movie is an unusual one; they are acting in it, under their own names, and they are being followed and filmed as they go about their daily lives. The director has filmed his real-life romantic reunion with the actress at a train station; he and his crew have joined her at her family home in the French countryside, where he works out an elaborate plan for getting her to reminisce on-camera.
33. THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
In Philip Kaufman’s surprisingly successful film adaptation of Czech author Milan Kundera’s demanding 1984 best-seller, Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Tomas, an overly amorous Prague surgeon, while Juliette Binoche plays Tereza, the waiflike beauty whom he marries. Even though he’s supposedly committed, Tomas continues his wanton womanizing.
Review: Empireonline
The contrast between Lena Olin’s woman of the world and Juliette Binoche’s ingenue is also sharply drawn. But the real star of the book is language itself and even intelligent cinema can’t do that very well. Consequently, the marriage of global politics – the setting is the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 – and sexual politics is rockier than in the source novel. Still, it’s arguably every bit as good as Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.
34. MULHOLLAND DRIVE
Along Mulholland Drive nothing is what it seems. In the unreal universe of Los Angeles, the city bares its schizophrenic nature, an uneasy blend of innocence and corruption, love and loneliness, beauty and depravity. A woman is left with amnesia following a car accident. An aspiring young actress finds her staying in her aunt’s home.
Review: Indiewire
Getting film critics to agree on the best movie from a particular time period can be like herding cats. David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” is the exception to that rule.Prior to being voted the best film of the 21st century in a BBC poll this week, the 2001 movie claimed the number one spot on “Best of the Decade” polls from Film Comment, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), Reverse Shot, and IndieWire.
35. DRESSED TO KILL
In this stylish, violent thriller,an unhappy wife, Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson), meets a handsome man in a museum and goes to his apartment for a quick sexual encounter. As she leaves, she is brutally murdered. Kate’s son, Peter (Keith Gordon) sets out to solve the murder aided by the call-girl Liz (Nancy Allen), who discovered his mother’s body and got a glimpse of the murderer, a blond woman. Peter begins watching the office of Kate’s psychiatrist
Review: NYTimes
A witty, romantic, psychological horror film and it’s almost as rewarding as a successful analysis…The fun is not in logic but watching how Mr. De Palma successfully tops himself as he goes along, and the fun lasts from the sexy, comic opening sequence right through to the film’s several endings.
36. SWIMMING POOL
Sarah Morton is a famous British mystery author. Tired of London and seeking inspiration for her new novel, she accepts an offer from her publisher John Bosload to stay at his home in Luberon, in the South of France. It is the off-season, and Sarah finds that the beautiful country locale and unhurried pace is just the tonic for her–until late one night, when John’s indolent and insouciant French daughter Julie unexpectedly arrives.
Review: Reelviews
The concept of involving a female mystery writer in a crime is not a new plot device. In fact, from Dorothy Sayers’ Harriet Vane to Angela Lansbury’s J.B. Fletcher, such women have populated detective fiction from its early days. Likewise, there’s nothing cinematically groundbreaking about the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, and reality and fantasy
37. SOMERSAULT
After making a misjudged advance towards her mother’s boyfriend, 16-year-old Heidi flees her home for the small Australian ski town of Jindabyne. Entranced by the startling beauty of the wintry landscapes and falling snow, she begins to create a new life for herself. With little money or practical experience, she accepts a job at a petrol station and finds lodging with Irene.
Review: Slantmagazine
Somersault’s 16-year-old lead runs away from home after getting caught kissing her mother’s boyfriend. Why the girl decides to make out with the tattooed lug while her mother is in the house not only strains for logic, but it’s beyond the film’s own limited introspection—it’s simply an excuse to get the catatonic tart out of the house in order to subject her to more horrors.
38. I AM LOVE
This lavish, sprawling drama from filmmaker Luca Guadagnino has drawn numerous comparisons to the films of Luchino Visconti for the grace with which it plumbs the inner workings of the Italian upper crust. Edoardo Recchi Sr. (Gabriele Ferzetti) is the aging patriarch of a Milanese clan that has amassed a significant fortune over the years through shrewd investments in the textile business. Edoardo Sr. has a beautiful wife, Allegra (Marisa Berenson), and the two have a reliable and dependable son, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono).
Review: Rogerebert
When we see Emma (Tilda Swinton) she is preparing the Recchi house for the birthday party of the patriarch. She seems to relate more as a caterer than as a hostess. At the head of the table is the grand old Edoardo (Gabriele Ferzetti). Among those gathered are his son and her husband, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono).
39. BAKJWI (THIRST)
Song Kang-ho, Shin Ha-kyun, and Kim Ok-bin star in Oldboy director Park Chan-wook’s frightener concerning a priest whose life takes a turn for the worst after he participates in a medical experiment to find a cure for a deadly disease.
Review: IMDB
Not for the squeamish, but the number of twists, inventive uses of situations using vampire mythology, gorgeous visual extremes, together with interesting and quirky characters make this one of the most stunning horror films I’ve ever seen. It descends into utter madness along with characters, but never seems exploitative or horrific without purpose.
40. WOMEN IN LOVE
Two sisters are courted by two very different men in the D. H. Lawrence classic Women In Love. Gudren (Glenda Jackson) is pursued by Gerald (Oliver Reed) a tough coal miner, while sister Ursula (Jenny Linden) is wooed by the school inspector Rupert (Alan Bates). One couple enters into the union with timidity but their love endures with time. The other couple engages in a frenzied, lustful flesh feast eventually ending in tragedy.
Review: Radiotimes
This adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel marked one of Ken Russell’s more successful forays into literature, with the director resisting the excesses that would come to mar some of his later films. Set in the mining community of Nottinghamshire in the 1920s, it stars Oliver Reed and Alan Bates as friends who woo sisters Jennie Linden and Glenda Jackson (who won an Oscar for her performance), in the process bringing love and tragedy upon them all.
41. RED WHITE & BLUE
Red, White and Blue is a powerful, visceral and oddly touching thriller/slash movie. It’s also very sophisticated storytelling with temporal shifts and three protagonist characters who function as both the killer and the prey.
Review: Theguardian
This low-budget American film by a British independent director stars the Australian actor Noah Taylor as a US veteran, unhinged by his experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. He tentatively holds out a hand of friendship to another loner, an abused girl in blue-collar Texas whose reckless promiscuity has made her HIV positive. Then when she becomes the victim of men whom she may have infected with Aids, he wreaks a terrible revenge on them. It is a tragic story of some power with echoes of Hubert Selby Jr’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn.
42. LIVE FLESH (CARNE TRÉMULA)
Pedro Almodovar’s most mature and restrained film is a superbly structured melodrama about five people whose lives in modern Madrid are inextricably linked by a bullet fired in a police scuffle.
Review: Imdb
One of Almodovar’s favourite conceits is the use of old TV and movie images as ironic commentary on our modern lives. He loves the sheer trashiness of those millions of hours of low-grade output and he likes to mimic 1950’s sitcom formats (“Women On The Verge”) or to splice ‘quotes’ from old footage into his modern tales. It’s a device which he uses very effectively in this film. When the gun is fired in the apartment, a shot rings out from the TV set in the corner.
43. NEVER FOREVER
Korean filmmaker Gina Kim directed this erotic drama about a woman’s dangerous response to her husband’s fertility issues. The Departed’s Vera Farmiga stars as Sophie, an American woman married to Korean-American Andrew (David McInnis). When Andrew’s inability to impregnate Sophie leads him to attempt suicide, Sophie seeks the help of a fertility clinic, but is turned away. Desperate to save her marriage, she begins paying Korean immigrant Jihah (Ha Jung-woo) for sex.
Review: Reelingreviews
This erotically charged melodrama about two vastly different Korean experiences in New York City and the Caucasian woman straddling both is beautifully directed by Gina Kim who balances emotional subtleties and highly charged scenarios without ever losing control. Vera Farmiga gives a deeply felt performance as the good, well kept wife who finds herself in a dingy Chinatown walkup and Jung-woo Ha is immensely appealing and affecting as her hard working, surprisingly romantic lover.
44. SHAME
Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is a New Yorker who shuns intimacy with women but feeds his desires with a compulsive addiction to sex. When his wayward younger sister (Carey Mulligan) moves into his apartment stirring memories of their shared painful past, Brandon’s insular life spirals out of control.
Review: Rogerebert
There’s a close-up in “Shame” of Michael Fassbender’s face showing pain, grief and anger. His character, Brandon, is having an orgasm. For the movie’s writer-director, Steve McQueen, that could be the film’s master shot. There is no concern about the movement of Brandon’s lower body. No concern about his partner. The close-up limits our view to his suffering. He is enduring a sexual function that has long since stopped giving him any pleasure and is self-abuse in the most profound way.
45. ANGEL HEART
The time is the 1950s: seedy Brooklyn private eye Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is hired by shady Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to locate a pop singer who reneged on a debt. Harry ventures into Harlem, the first step of a Heart of Darkness-inspired odyssey. Each time Harry makes contact with someone who might know the singer’s whereabouts, he or she is killed in a horrible, ritualistic fashion; a Satanic cult seems to be at the bottom of all the carnage.
Review: Empireonline
Trust Alan Parker, a master with the stippled strokes and dappled sunbeams of 80s ad-atmospherics, to coat this overwrought but memorable noir-horror nonsense in super-soupy layers of Southern Gothic window-dressing. The film oozes along with a superficial sense of unease, leaden with overcooked metaphors: from hoodoo chicken heads to the hollow clang of descending elevators.
46. SEA OF LOVE
In this thriller, Al Pacino stars as Frank Keller, an alcoholic policeman in the depths of middle-age crisis. Frank begins investigating a serial killer who finds her victims through the personal ads and kills them while the song “Sea of Love” plays on the stereo. Responding to one of the ads, Frank finds himself falling in love with the sultry blonde Helen (Ellen Barkin), who happens to be the most likely suspect.
Review: Empireonline
Having returned to his theatrical roots for five years, Al Pacino returned fully refreshed for this tight thriller, let down only by the implausibility of its denouement. Detective Frank Keller is a good fit for Pacino, or it could just be how skilfully the actor moulds him into a genuine human being: he’s a loner, trying to keep the bitterness at bay, hunkered down in his job, the only place his instincts can live.
47. BLUEBEARD
Controversial filmmaker Catherine Breillat puts a new spin on an ancient story in this multileveled drama. In France in the mid-’50s, Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites) enjoys toying with her older sister, Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti), by reading her the story of the murderous and oft-married Bluebeard, embellishing the story with plenty of gore and scaring the girl out of her wits.
Review: Rottentomatoes
A strangely disjointed tale, based on the Bluebeard fairy tale, told as a cautionary tale that leaves the viewer feeling somehow short-changed. One questions the artistic decision to tell the tale as a young girl reading it to her older sister, and then dissolving to the action of the story
48. THE MOTHER
May is an ordinary grandmother from the North of England. When her husband dies on a family visit to London, she recedes into the background of her busy, metropolitan children’s lives. Stuck in an unfamiliar city, far from home, May fears that she has become another invisible old lady whose life is more or less over. Until, that is, she embarks on a passionate affair with Darren, a man half her age who is renovating her son’s house and sleeping with her daughter.
Review: Rogerebert
The film opens in the reassuring environs of British domesticity. A long-married couple travel into London to visit their children. May (Anne Reid) still has her health and the remains of her beauty, but Toots (Peter Vaughan) seems always out of breath. They arrive at the expensive new home of their son Bobby (Steven Mackintosh), go for dinner at the flat of their daughter Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw) and then Toots dies of a heart attack.
49. BODY DOUBLE
Body Double, director Brian DePalma pays homage to the Alfred Hitchcock movies Vertigo and Rear Window, adding a few grotesque touches all his own. Craig Wasson plays Jake, a struggling actor who keeps losing jobs because of his claustrophobia. To make matters worse, his girlfriend has walked out on him, so he has no place to sleep. His pal offers him the use of his apartment for the evening.
Review: Empireonline
A typical Brian De Palma effort from the 1980s, borrowing ideas from Hitchcock even as it goes all-out for the kind of effects only DePalma would even consider. Undigested chunks of the plots of Vertigo and Rear Window are stirred into a defiantly downbeat, grim and perverse storyline in which objectionable characters slaughter each other, and even the hero is branded as a panty‑sniffing loon by the cops.
50. DAMAGE
Adapted from Josephine Hart’s spare novel by British screenwriter David Hare and French director Louis Malle, this brooding erotic drama concerns the obsessive sexual relationship between an English politician and his son’s lover. Stephen Flemming (Jeremy Irons), an up-and-coming member of Parliament, has a beautiful and loving wife, Ingrid (Miranda Richardson), and two children, including son Martyn (Rupert Graves), a successsful journalist.
Review: Empireonline
Walking a precarious line between stark, penetrating drama and pretentious twaddle, Louis Malle’s terribly British vision of erotic obsession, adapted from Josephine Hart’s bestseller, is alternately compelling and risible, hypnotic and remote. Irons is Stephen Fleming, a respected Tory MP being groomed for a Cabinet position.
