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Best Sexuality Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of sexuality cinema — measured across 1,268 indexed frames from 19 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Sexuality films over-index on pillow, bed and mirror — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Young & Beautiful (2013)

    François OzonDP Pascal MartiIMDb 6.7TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    French teenager Isabelle is spending her summer holiday with her middle-class family in the south of France and decides to lose her virginity with German teenager Felix. Then she returns to Paris with her mother Sylvie, her stepfather Patrick and her younger brother Victor. Then Isabelle works as a call girl using the nickname Lea, meeting old men. She feels affection for her client Georges that is married with a daughter. When Georges dies from a heart attack while having sex with Isabelle in a hotel, she flees but the police investigate and identify her. The detectives in charge of the investigation disclose to Sylvie, who is devastated.

  2. 2

    Babygirl (2024)

    Halina ReijnDP Jasper WolfIMDb 5.8TMDB 5.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much-younger intern.

  3. 3

    The Dreamers (2003)

    Bernardo BertolucciDP Fabio CianchettiIMDb 7.1TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Paris, spring 1968. While most students take the lead in the May 'revolution', a French poet's twin son Theo and daughter Isabelle enjoy the good life in his grand Paris home. As film buffs they meet and 'adopt' modest, conservatively educated Californian student Matthew. With their parents away for a month, they drag him into an orgy of indulgence of all senses, losing all of his and the last of their innocence. A sexual threesome shakes their rapport, yet only the outside reality will break it up.

  4. 4

    Sex, Lies And Videotape

    Steven SoderberghDP Walt LloydIMDb 7.2TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    John and Ann Mullany, a junior partner at a law firm and a housewife respectively, are a young, upwardly mobile couple, who most would deem to have a perfect life. Ann's outward perfection belies the fact that she is in therapy, dealing with the stress over worrying about global issues with which she has little to no control. She does not see certain things with which she does have control being problems in her life, namely her sexual repression or her disinterest in sex as an activity, that is until it manifested itself in this stress which in turn is having, what she believes, a negative impact on her marriage. What she is unaware of is that, long before her stress began, John embarked on an affair with her sister, bartender Cynthia Bishop, who she doesn't admire as being too "loud". John reconnects with a close friend from college named Graham Dalton, who, to John, appears to have lost his way in life in the years that they have not been in touch. Graham, via the method in which he deals with his emotional and sexual problems - which is also believes is being totally forthright to all concerned - has a profound effect on Cynthia, John and Ann, who in turn, especially Ann, have a profound effect on him.

  5. 5

    Love (2015)

    Gaspar NoéDP Benoît DebieIMDb 6.1TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Murphy is an American cinema school student, living in Paris. He had a French girlfriend, called Electra, whom he dated for two years. One day, they met and had a no-strings-attached threesome with another woman, a young blonde Danish teenager named Omi, as a way to add some excitement to their love life. But later, he had sex with her behind Electra's back, as a result of which Omi became pregnant. This unplanned pregnancy ended the relationship between Murphy and Electra on a horrible note, and it forced Murphy to marry Omi. In one morning, Electra's mother, Nora, phones him to ask if he's heard from Electra, because she hasn't heard from her for three months, and given her daughter's suicidal tendencies. For the rest of this day, he recalls his past two years with Electra in a series of fragmented, nonlinear flashbacks; how they first met in Paris, their quick hookup, and their lives over the next two years which is filled with drug abuse, rough sex and tender moments.

  6. 6

    9 Songs (2004)

    Michael WinterbottomDP Marcel ZyskindIMDb 4.7TMDB 5.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Matt, a young glaciologist, soars across the vast, silent, icebound immensities of the South Pole as he recalls his love affair with Lisa. They meet at a mobbed rock concert in a vast music hall - London's Brixton Academy. They are in bed at night's end. Together, over a period of several months, they pursue a mutual sexual passion whose inevitable stages unfold in counterpoint to nine live-concert songs.

  7. 7

    Nymphomaniac Vol 2 (2013)

    Lars von TrierDP Manuel Alberto ClaroIMDb 6.6TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    Joe continues to tell to Seligman the story of her life. Joe lives with Jerôme and their son Marcel and out of the blue, she loses sexual sensation in intercourse. Joe seeks kinky sex, perversions and sadomasochism expecting to retrieve her sex drive. Jerôme leaves home with Marcel and gives his son to a foster house for adoption. Then Joe is sent to therapy by her gynecologist but she does not admit that she is addicted to sex. Meanwhile Seligman tells Joe that he is virgin and helps her to understand her actions. Joe believes that Seligman is her friend, but is he?

  8. 8

    I Saw The TV Glow (2024)

    Jane SchoenbrunDP Eric K. YueIMDb 5.8TMDB 6.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate Maddy introduces him to a mysterious TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.

  9. 9

    A Clockwork Orange (1971)

    Stanley KubrickDP John AlcottIMDb 8.2TMDB 8.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Protagonist Alex DeLarge is an "ultraviolent" youth in futuristic Britain. As with all luck, his eventually runs out and he's arrested and convicted of murder. While in prison, Alex learns of an experimental program in which convicts are programmed to detest violence. If he goes through the program, his sentence will be reduced and he will be back on the streets sooner than expected. But Alex's ordeals are far from over once he hits the streets of Britain..

  10. 10

    The Piano (1993)

    Jane CampionDP Stuart DryburghIMDb 7.5TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    It is the mid-nineteenth century. Ada cannot speak and she has a young daughter, Flora. In an arranged marriage she leaves her native Scotland accompanied by her daughter and her beloved piano. Life in the rugged forests of New Zealand's North Island is not all she may have imagined and nor is her relationship with her new husband Stewart. She suffers torment and loss when Stewart sells her piano to a neighbor, George. Ada learns from George that she may earn back her piano by giving him piano lessons, but only with certain other conditions attached. At first Ada despises George but slowly their relationship is transformed and this propels them into a dire situation.

What sexuality films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a sexuality frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — pillow is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • pillow2.8×
  • bed2.8×
  • mirror2.7×
  • skin2.3×
  • sofa2.1×
  • hair2.1×
  • lamp2.1×
  • glass1.9×

How sexuality films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate sexuality from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 28%closeupvs 21% baseline
  • 34%naturalvs 44% baseline

What breaks the pattern

The Trial (1962) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 1,268 frames from 19 films carrying the sexuality label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/sexuality

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These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used