Best Erotic Movies Ranked By Rotten Tomatoes
These are not straight-up porn movies. The list prepared by Rotten Tomatoeshas sleaze, international and arthouse flicks as well as LGBTQ-focused stuff that are seductive, titillating, thrilling in equal measure.
Here are the best erotic movies ranked by Rotten Tomatoes.
1. La Belle Noiseuse (1991)
- Director: Jacques Rivette
- Writers: Pascal Bonitzer (scenario), Christine Laurent (scenario)
- Stars: Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, Emmanuelle Béart
Plot Summary
We’re in the south of France, in the 18th-century Chateau d’Assas, where Nicholas (David Burztein), a young painter, and his girlfriend, Marianne (Béart), are visiting aging, semi-retired painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli).
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.”
Nicholas offhandedly offers up Marianne as a model for the old man. Frenhofer accepts, seeing the opportunity as a chance to resuscitate, or reinvent, an abandoned piece he had originally begun featuring his wife (Jane Birkin).
Review
The great central passages of the film involve creation. In his cavernous stone studio, which reminds Marianne of her boarding-school chapel, Frenhofer begins to sketch her. We observe over his shoulder.
Rivette use a static camera and long takes. He rarely cuts away We see a blank sheet of paper, and the drawing taking shape there. We see the physical process: First, Frenhofer’s obsession with arranging his pens, his brushes, his inks and paints.
At first we observe Emmanuelle Béart as a woman. Then we see her as a model. Slowly we come to see her as Frenhofer wants to: The woman inside, the essence, the being.
Does it sound boring to watch a man simply drawing for extended periods? Yes, it does. But it is not. Suspense is building.
2. Belle De Jour (1968)
- Director: Luis Buñuel (as Luis Bunuel)
- Writers: Joseph Kessel (novel) (as Joseph Kessel de l’Académie Française), Luis Buñuel (adaptation) (as Luis Bunuel)
- Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli
Plot Summary
Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), is a 23 year old. beautiful, newlywed housewife, married to the respectable and uninteresting surgeon, Dr. Pierre Serizy (Jean Sorel). She loves her husband dearly, but cannot bring herself to be physically intimate with him. She indulges instead in vivid, kinky, erotic fantasies to entertain her sexual desires. Eventually, she becomes a prostitute, working in a brothel in the afternoons while remaining chaste in her marriage.
Haunted by childhood memories involving her father, Séverine goes to address of the high-class brothel, leaves, and then enters, meeting Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page). Reluctant at first, she responds to the “firm hand” of Madame Anaïs, who names her “Belle de Jour,” and has sex with her first john.
While visiting a ski resort, they meet two friends, Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli) and Renée (Macha Méril). Séverine does not like Husson’s manner and the way he looks at her.
Husson discovers her secret one afternoon when he comes to the brothel for sex. Séverine at first demands he leave, then offers to have sex with him, but he says he was more attracted to her when he knew she was the wife of a “Boy Scout” and declines.
Review
It is one of life’s surprising ironies that the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel, having turned out a succession of masterpieces with no particular box office movie, should now be enjoying the first big commercial success of his career with a movie which is less than a masterpiece, but sexy. And in color.
“Belle de Jour” is a study in female sexuality, and the difficulties thereof. “Belle de Jour” is, like much of Buñuel’s work, almost icily cold and impersonal but at the same time an oblique and paradoxical testament to love.
3. Sex, Lies, And Videotape (1989)
This film is 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 has almost no interest in sex. John is interested in sex and is having an affair with Ann’s sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo).
Into this dysfunctional picture comes Graham (James Spader), a college friend of John’s whom he hasn’t seen in nine years. Graham has decided that talking about sex is more interesting than actually having sex, so he meets women and asks them discuss their desires and fantasies as he tapes them with a camcorder.
4. Weekend (2011)
Russell, 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. This affecting and naturalistic romance is beautifully realized, earning comparisons to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise in its exploration of how two people can come together only briefly, yet impact each other in a profound way.
5. Blue Velvet (1986)
This hallucinogenic mystery-thriller probes beneath the cheerful surface of suburban America to discover sadomasochistic violence, corruption, drug abuse, crime and perversion. Walking through a field near his home, Jeffrey Beaumont discovers a severed human ear, which he immediately brings to the police.
Their disinterest sparks Jeff’s curiosity, and he is soon drawn into a dangerous drama that’s being played out by a lounge singer, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and the ether-addicted Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). The sociopathic Booth has kidnapped Dorothy’s young son and is using the child as a bargaining chip to repeatedly beat, humiliate and rape Dorothy.