Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America

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Based on Jane Rule’s novel, Donna Deitch’s debut feature is a 1959-set love story that unites an East Coast intellectual divorcée and a Nevada ranch girl. A decade before Basic Instinctlaunched the era of the mainstream erotic thriller, Lawrence Kasdan reinvented film noir for a sophisticated modern audience with this sweaty tale of scheming femmes fatales. Not a sex scene, per se. We’re talking about the famous fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, in which squeaky-clean Ryan reaches a screaming climax (presumably over the pastrami).

Long before the movie eases into its more serious register, delivery boy Mookie (Lee) goes AWOL from his route, teasing girlfriend Tina (Perez) with dripping ice cubes skillfully applied to bared parts of her body. In her most iconic role, Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine, a beautiful and bored Parisian housewife who takes a job working the afternoon shift at a high-end brothel. Two men make love in the water and we see a flash of an erection. As an act of rebellion, it was a happy accident, as Jarman recalled: ‘We left in the hard-on during editing and the censor unknowingly passed it because it was at the bottom of the screen and we showed it to him in the wrong screen ratio.’Linda is unable to orgasm, so she pays a visit to a psychiatrist, Dr. Young (Reems) – a real kook but horny as hell. He discovers her unusual condition. His solution? A technique called ‘deep throat.’ He suggests Linda practice on him. The local nuns, convinced that they have been possessed by the devil, are having their demons exorcised by a witch hunter. But when their psychosomatic condition remains unresolved, they promptly descend into an orgiastic fever, some of them using a giant crucifix as a dildo, commencing a sequence that has since become known as the Rape of Christ. There's only room in Baltimore for one person to claim the title of Filthiest Person Alive. Will it be Divine's Babs Johnson or jealous sleazoids the Marbles?

Call it a hot take if you want, but South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker are better at making movies than television – at least, it’s the medium where they’ve hit their targets most squarely. In this pointedly puerile action satire, the duo drop a WMD on both George W Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ and the movies that propped up Reagan-era jingoism in the 1980s – using marionette puppets.

It gets mighty cold up there in the hills of Wyoming. After a night drinking whiskey, the ranchers huddle up for warmth, and then…

One evening in a park near Beijing’s Forbidden City (the Chinese capital’s prime cruising destination), a cop arrests A Lan, one of the furtive men seeking companionship. The ensuing interrogation lasts all night. A hard-charging lawyer (Spader) hires an unstable young assistant (Gyllenhaal) who turns the tables on him in a sadomasochistic relationship conducted after hours. Between the movie’s early comic blisses and troubling desert finale lies one memorable love scene in a cheap motel shower. Luke and Jon, both HIV-positive and on the run from the law, share an awkward but very memorable sudsy embrace. Cary Grant is a New York ad man mistaken for a spy and pursued across America by a shady cabal, sending him scurrying through cornfields, scaling Mount Rushmore and eventually crawling into the arms of femme fatale Eva Marie Saint, who might also be playing him for a mark.

After the catatonic breakdown of stage star Elisabet (Ullmann), she and nurse Alma (Andersson) enter into a fluid, mesmerizing power struggle, also a meeting of the minds. It’s become infamous: Rupert (Bates) and Gerald (Reed) sit in a drawing room next to a roaring fire. Gerald: ‘I have a feeling that if I don’t watch myself, I’ll do something silly.’ Next thing you know, they’re wrestling each other nude, rolling on the floor and slapping each other. ‘Was it too much for you?’ asks Gerald at the end.

The second official effort of the Dogme 95 movement, Von Trier’s impish provocation tells the story of a woman named Karen who, eager to escape from her life, falls in with a group of able-bodied adults who pretend to be mentally handicapped in public. We could have gone for the scene that gave American Pieits title, because – let’s face it – the sight of a teenager screwing baked goods remains pretty groundbreaking. But instead we prefer the moment where Jim (Biggs) is seduced by his flexible East European houseguest (Elizabeth), but sadly steps off the love train a stop or two early. Based on Annie Proulx’s story about the love affair between two cowboys, Ang Lee’s beautiful, swooning film starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as range hands who fall in love.Cheryl’s love interest is Diana, played by Guinevere Turner. As the two women sit watching one of the old movies, Diana bluntly puts it like this: ‘Now that we know that we’re attracted to each other, what do we do? Don’t you think we should kiss?’