From Cecil B. DeMille dramas to Jane Schoenbrun slashers, Close-Up Culture list the 100 movies that have shaped the way we sex and relationships.

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1. A Fool There Was (1915)

“Kiss me, my fool!” Those are the iconic words of Theda Bara’s vampire seductress in this landmark film, which helped establish one of cinema’s earliest sexual archetypes: the woman whose desire is dangerous to men. Because men could never be at fault, eh?

2. Male and Female (1919)

Cecil B. DeMille’s drama – starring Gloria Swanson – strands a rich woman and her butler on a deserted island, dropping strict social rules to help kickstart Hollywood’s obsession with sex appeal. A film perfectly timed with the start of the Jazz Age.

3. The Sheik (1921)

Rudolph Valentino became Hollywood’s ultimate male sex symbol in this blockbuster about a headstrong Englishwoman captured by a desert Arabian chieftain. It broke many taboos and sparked protests from insecure men who were threatened by this new ‘exotic’ hunk.

4. The Queen of Sheba (1921)

This lavish biblical drama stars Betty Blythe as the legendary monarch, gaining immediate notoriety for its rather revealing costumes – which Blythe famously joked could all fit into a single shoebox.

5. A Woman of Paris (1923)

Charlie Chaplin ditched comedy and decided to change the rules of Hollywood romance with this realistic drama about an unmarried mistress in Paris, offering a sophisticated look at relationships.

6. The Marriage Circle (1924)

Ernst Lubitsch’s silent comedy follows a chaotic web of flirtations, wandering eyes, and mistaken infidelities among two Viennese couples. His famous “Lubitsch touch” would become shorthand for communicating sex through suggestion and wit.

7. The Merry Widow (1925)

Erich von Stroheim’s drama tested censorship limits with its overt sensuality while cementing John Gilbert as Hollywood’s next romantic idol.

8. It (1927)

No, no, no – this has nothing to do with creepy clowns. Instead Clara Bow’s Betty Lou gave gave the Jazz Age its definitive blueprint for effortless sex appeal and helped create the modern Hollywood “It Girl”.

9. Pandora’s Box (1929)

G.W. Pabst’s provocative masterpiece cemented Louise Brooks and her iconic bob haircut as symbols of ‘dangerous’ sexuality.

10. Morocco (1930)

Marlene Dietrich wearing a tuxedo and kissing another woman became one of early Hollywood’s great images of sexual ambiguity. The film proved that suggestion could be every bit as provocative as explicitness.

11. Queen Christina (1933)

This historical drama gives a surprisingly modern look at gender and sexuality, featuring the legendary Greta Garbo in men’s clothing.

12. It Happened One Night (1934)

Frank Capra’s legendary romantic comedy – starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable – proved that a movie could be sexy using purely verbal sparring and a famously strategic hitchhiking leg.

13. Gone with the Wind (1939)

Beyond its massive scale, the film redefined the cinematic blockbuster by showcasing an uncommonly complex, deeply flawed heroine driven by self-preservation rather than virtue.

14. Rebecca (1940)

Alfred Hitchcock made marriage itself feel like a psychological thriller. The unnamed second Mrs de Winter enters a relationship haunted by the sexual and emotional power of the woman who came before her.

15. Brief Encounter (1945)

David Lean made an adulterous affair devastating without needing to show much physical intimacy at all. It demonstrated that repression could be erotic, and that emotional infidelity could be every bit as destructive as sex.

16. Gilda (1946)

Rita Hayworth removing a glove became one of Hollywood’s most famous examples of turning innuendo into spectacle. The film helped cement the femme fatale as an image of female sexual power.

17. Out of the Past (1947)

Jane Greer’s Kathie Moffat helped define the seductive, morally ambiguous woman who could destroy a man simply by walking into a room.

18. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Stellaaaaaa! Tennessee Williams’ sexuality, violence and frustrated desire survived Hollywood censorship only after considerable compromise. Marlon Brando’s working-man performance also helped redefine male sexuality as something raw, physical and vulnerable rather than simply polished.

19. The Moon Is Blue (1953)

Otto Preminger deliberately challenged the Production Code by using words such as “virgin” and “seduction”. Its success helped weaken Hollywood censorship and opened the door to much more candid discussions of sex.

20. All That Heaven Allows (1955)

Douglas Sirk used a seemingly conventional romance to attack class prejudice, social conformity and expectations of respectable womanhood. With a central question that is surprisingly modern: what if happiness matters more than what everyone else thinks your life should look like?

21. And God Created Woman (1956)

Brigitte Bardot’s Juliette is sexually confident, impulsive and completely uninterested in behaving herself. It saw Bardot transformed into a global sex symbol and permanently altered the landscape of adult cinema.

22. Some Like It Hot (1959)

Billy Wilder used cross-dressing to create one of Hollywood’s funniest films while quietly destroying a few assumptions about gender and attraction. Its famous final shrug – that nobody is perfect – remains a brilliant acknowledgement that desire doesn’t always behave itself.

23. The Apartment (1960)

Billy Wilder made adultery and loneliness the subject of a mainstream comedy. And in doing so, brilliantly captured the bittersweet underbelly of modern romance at the turn of the swinging sixties.

24. Psycho (1960)

Hitchcock opens with a couple who have apparently just had sex and then links sexuality, guilt and violence throughout the film. Its shower sequence also demonstrated how much erotic tension and terror could be created without actually showing very much.

25. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

Karel Reisz’s gritty drama broke major ground by ditching polite romance to show the messy, unvarnished realities of casual sex, unwanted pregnancy, and backstreet abortion.

26. The Children’s Hour (1961)

William Wyler confronted lesbianism at a time when Hollywood could barely say the word. Its tragic treatment is constrained by its era, but simply putting same-sex desire into a major studio drama was significant.

27. Jules et Jim (1962)

François Truffaut threw conventional romantic triangles out of the window with a warm, non-judgmental, and deeply human look at a polyamorous love triangle.

28. Belle de Jour (1967)

Luis Buñuel made female fantasy, prostitution and bourgeois respectability collide in one beautifully strange film. Catherine Deneuve’s Séverine is sexually curious without being reduced to a simple story of liberation or repression.

29. The Graduate (1967)

Benjamin Braddock’s affair with Mrs Robinson became a shorthand for generational sexual confusion. Mike Nichols captured a generation discovering that adulthood, sex and relationships weren’t nearly as straightforward as they had been promised.

30. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Sex and violence suddenly became much more physically present in mainstream American cinema. The film helped demonstrate that romantic relationships could exist outside respectable society and still become the emotional centre of a blockbuster.

31. Women in Love (1969)

Ken Russell adapted D.H. Lawrence’s novel into a film unusually interested in female desire and male intimacy. Most notably, it redefined on-screen masculinity with its famously intense, fully nude male wrestling scene.

32. Midnight Cowboy (1969)

John Schlesinger put loneliness, male vulnerability and sex work at the centre of an American mainstream film. Its Oscar win was another sign that Hollywood’s old moral boundaries were evaporating.

33. A New Leaf (1971)

Elaine May’s wonderfully dark romantic comedy turns marriage into a financial transaction before gradually making it something much stranger and more affectionate.

34. The Last Picture Show (1971)

Peter Bogdanovich captured young people discovering sex in a dying small town without turning the experience into simple glamour. Sexual awakening here is awkward, confusing and tied to the wider loneliness of adolescence.

35. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder placed a lesbian relationship at the centre of a claustrophobic psychological drama. Desire here isn’t treated as a novelty but as something capable of producing obsession, jealousy, cruelty and heartbreak.

36. Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Bernardo Bertolucci pushed erotic cinema into territory that remains deeply controversial. Its importance is inseparable from the ethical questions surrounding its production and the treatment of Maria Schneider.

37. The Way We Were (1973)

Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford became the faces of a romance built around political and personal incompatibility. It also helped popularise an idea that has become central to modern romantic storytelling: sometimes two people can genuinely love each other and still be wrong for one another.

38. The Exorcist (1973)

William Friedkin’s horror classic isn’t an obvious relationship movie, but its treatment of puberty, female sexuality and the fear surrounding a young girl’s changing body was hugely provocative. It turned anxieties about adolescence and sexuality into mainstream horror.

39. The Story of O (1975)

This controversial adaptation pushed sadomasochistic fantasy into mainstream erotic cinema. It also helped fuel the continuing argument over whether representations of sexual submission can be empowering, exploitative, or somehow both.

40. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Chantal Akerman made domestic labour, female routine and prostitution the actual substance of a three-hour film. It showed how the systemic repression of women can turn the most ordinary life into a psychological pressure cooker.

41. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

It gave generations of audiences permission to play with gender, sexuality and identity. Its midnight screenings then turned that permission into a communal experience in which dressing up and participation became part of watching the film.

42. Network (1976)

Sidney Lumet’s satire isn’t really about sex, but it is deeply concerned with the way television packages intimacy and emotion for consumption. Its portrait of people turning private relationships into public spectacle feels remarkably relevant to the age of social media.

43. Opening Night (1977)

John Cassavetes explored ageing, performance, marriage and female identity through Gena Rowlands’ extraordinary performance. It is less interested in romantic fantasy than in the terrifying question of who we become when the identity we’ve built starts to disappear.

44. Saturday Night Fever (1977)

Beyond the white suit and hit soundtrack, the film offered a surprisingly dark, unvarnished look at the toxic machismo of the late-seventies club scene.

45. The Last Waltz (1978)

Martin Scorsese’s concert film is really a portrait of musicians, friendship and intimacy within a collapsing community. It helped establish the modern music documentary as a form capable of exploring relationships rather than simply recording performances.

46. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

Divorce became the emotional centre of a major Hollywood drama rather than something happening to secondary characters. Its changing ideas about fatherhood and motherhood reflected a society in which traditional family roles were being renegotiated.

47. My Brilliant Career (1979)

Gillian Armstrong’s film gave a young woman the radical option of choosing herself over marriage. Its refusal to treat romance as the inevitable reward at the end of a woman’s story remains quietly revolutionary.

48. Cruising (1980)

William Friedkin entered New York’s gay leather scene and turned it into the setting for a controversial police thriller.

49. Body Heat (1981)

Lawrence Kasdan revived film noir for a sexually permissive era. Kathleen Turner and William Hurt’s affair demonstrated that erotic thrillers could become major mainstream entertainment.

50. The Fly (1986)

David Cronenberg transformed body horror into a disturbing metaphor for love, ageing and the deterioration of a relationship.

51. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Stephen Frears placed a gay interracial relationship inside Thatcher’s Britain, surrounded by class conflict and racism.

52. 9½ Weeks (1986)

The film brought underground BDSM dynamics straight into the mainstream pop-culture conversation, capturing a distinctively slick, consumer-driven era of 1980s desire.

53. Maurice (1987)

James Ivory adapted E.M. Forster’s story about a gay man trapped by the restrictions of Edwardian society. It offered audiences a rare gay love story that wasn’t defined solely by tragedy.

54. Dirty Dancing (1987)

Baby’s sexual awakening became an influential example of the coming-of-age romance in which desire is part of growing up rather than something shameful.

55. When Harry Met Sally… (1989)

Rob Reiner turned the question of whether men and women can be “just friends” into a cultural obsession. Its conversational approach made emotional compatibility feel just as important as sexual chemistry.

56. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee understands that intimacy doesn’t exist separately from race, class and power. The film’s relationships are shaped by the social tensions around them, making love and sexuality part of a much larger conversation about American identity.

57. Paris Is Burning (1990)

Jennie Livingston’s film permanently transformed the global vocabulary of gender performance, queer romance, and intersectional survival.

58. Thelma & Louise (1991)

Ridley Scott gave two women the road movie traditionally reserved for men and made sexual violence central to their transformation. Its ending became one of cinema’s most powerful statements about female friendship, autonomy and the cost of escaping male control.

59. Basic Instinct (1992)

Paul Verhoeven deliberately played with the conventions of the erotic thriller and gave Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell enormous sexual power.

60. The Piano (1993)

Jane Campion made female desire the driving force of this gothic romance.

61. Philadelphia (1993)

Jonathan Demme brought AIDS, homosexuality and discrimination into the mainstream American courtroom drama. Tom Hanks’ performance helped make a gay protagonist dealing with prejudice part of Hollywood’s central conversation.

62. Chungking Express (1994)

Wong Kar-wai made modern loneliness feel exhilarating rather than simply sad. Its fleeting encounters, failed relationships and strange little connections captured the intimacy of urban life before dating apps made the alienating phenomenon even more familiar.

63. The Birdcage (1996)

Mike Nichols placed a loving gay couple and their family at the centre of a huge mainstream comedy. Its success helped normalise gay relationships for audiences who might otherwise have encountered them only in dramas about tragedy or prejudice.

64. The Watermelon Woman (1996)

Cheryl Dunye mixed fiction, documentary and film history to investigate the erasure of Black lesbian filmmakers. A crucial work of New Queer Cinema.

65. Boogie Nights (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson used the porn industry to explore sex, friendship, ambition and chosen family. Beneath all the nudity is a surprisingly warm film about people searching for somewhere to belong.

66. Titanic (1997)

Jack and Rose’s romance turned class rebellion and sexual awakening into the centre of the biggest movie in the world. Its extraordinary success demonstrated that an unabashedly romantic blockbuster could still become a genuine cultural phenomenon.

67. The Wedding Singer (1998)

The film helped revive the romantic comedy through nostalgia, chemistry and two fundamentally ordinary people.

68. Boys Don’t Cry (1999)

Kimberly Peirce brought the story of Brandon Teena to a mainstream audience at enormous emotional cost. The film made a transgender man’s identity and romantic life impossible to treat as an abstract issue.

69. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Stanley Kubrick’s final film takes marriage, jealousy and fantasy and slowly pulls them apart. It suggests that the erotic life of a relationship doesn’t necessarily disappear behind the bedroom door.

70. In the Mood for Love (2000)

Wong Kar-wai made restraint more erotic than explicit sex. Two neighbours fall in love while refusing to become the people who hurt their spouses, creating one of cinema’s most beautiful examinations of desire, fidelity and regret.

71. Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

Alfonso Cuarón bittersweet coming-of-age story uses sexual exploration, fluid masculinity, and intense heartbreak to mirror the deep political and social divisions of modern Mexico.

72. Secretary (2002)

Steven Shainberg placed BDSM inside an unconventional romantic comedy. Its central idea is surprisingly simple: a relationship doesn’t have to resemble everyone else’s to be healthy or fulfilling.

73. Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Ang Lee placed a gay love story inside the mythology of the American Western. Its enormous mainstream success helped move queer romance from a niche subject into the tradition of the great cinematic love story.

74. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)

Judd Apatow made male sexual insecurity the joke rather than male sexual conquest. The film helped kick-start a wave of comedies about emotionally immature men discovering waxing… and that intimacy involves considerably more than getting laid.

75. Lust, Caution (2007)

Famous for its intensely explicit sex scenes, Ang Lee’s film pushed mainstream rating boundaries to capture raw physical intimacy not for cheap shock value, but as a visceral psychological battlefield.

76. The Kids Are All Right (2010)

Lisa Cholodenko put a long-term lesbian relationship at the centre of a mainstream family comedy-drama. Its significance lies in treating a same-sex couple not as a political statement but as an ordinary, complicated family capable of exactly the same mistakes as everyone else.

77. Blue Valentine (2010)

Derek Cianfrance refused the romantic-comedy fantasy that finding the right person guarantees a happy ending. By showing a relationship both falling in love and falling apart, it made the everyday mechanics of intimacy feel brutally recognisable.

78. Pariah (2011)

Dee Rees’ debut follows a young Black woman discovering her sexuality while negotiating family expectations. It helped broaden the language of coming-out cinema by making queer identity inseparable from race, gender and belonging.

79. Weekend (2011)

Andrew Haigh made a brief encounter between two men feel as emotionally significant as a decades-long romance. Its naturalistic conversations helped move queer cinema away from stories defined primarily by tragedy or coming out.

80. Her (2013)

By exploring a deeply intimate, entirely non-physical relationship, Spike Jonze’s film serves as a brilliant, melancholic mirror for the digital age

81. The Way He Looks (2014)

Daniel Ribeiro’s Brazilian coming-of-age film centres a blind teenager discovering friendship, independence and first love. Its sweetness comes from refusing to make either disability or sexuality a problem that the protagonist must overcome.

82. Carol (2015)

Todd Haynes gave Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian romance a sumptuous period setting while refusing to treat its central relationship as a tragedy waiting to happen.

83. Tangerine (2015)

Sean Baker’s film places trans characters at the centre of a funny, chaotic story where they get to be messy human beings.

84. The Handmaiden (2016)

Park Chan-wook turned a story of deception and exploitation into a sensual romance between two women.

85. Moonlight (2016)

Barry Jenkins made sexuality, masculinity and identity inseparable from vulnerability. Its quiet portrayal of queer Black desire challenged the idea that masculinity has to be loud, aggressive or emotionally closed.

86. Call Me by Your Name (2017)

Luca Guadagnino presented queer desire as a profound romantic experience rather than a problem that needs solving.

87. God’s Own Country (2017)

Francis Lee’s Yorkshire romance strips queer cinema of the tragedy that had dominated so many earlier stories. Two men simply fall in love, work, argue and try to build something together.

88. The Shape of Water (2017)

Guillermo del Toro created a love story in which the conventional boundaries between human, monster, gender and sexuality become deliberately unstable.

89. The Favourite (2018)

Yorgos Lanthimos turned a historical love triangle between three women into something funny, cruel and sexually charged.

90. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Céline Sciamma made the act of looking central to the relationship between two women. By making desire reciprocal and giving both women agency over how they are seen, the film quietly challenges some of cinema’s oldest assumptions about the gaze.

91. The Farewell (2019)

Lulu Wang film’s beautifully explores how relationships are anchored by the silent, deeply emotional burdens we choose to carry for one another.

92. Happiest Season (2020)

Clea DuVall put a lesbian relationship inside the traditional Christmas romantic comedy. Its importance was partly its normality: queer couples were no longer required to justify their existence before being allowed a conventional romantic story.

93. The Worst Person in the World (2021)

Joachim Trier captures the modern fear that choosing one life means losing all the others you could have lived.

94. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

This film’s treatment of queer identity, family expectation and unconditional love helped push the multiverse blockbuster into surprisingly intimate territory.

95. Rye Lane (2023)

Raine Allen-Miller’s rom-com offers a joyful, culturally rich celebration of Black love, moving past traditional genre cliches to deliver a brilliantly fresh look at vulnerability and dating in the digital age.

96. Past Lives (2023)

Celine Song understands that love isn’t always about ending up together. Sometimes the most powerful relationship is the one that exists between the life you chose and the life you didn’t.

97. All of Us Strangers (2023)

Andrew Haigh combines queer romance with grief, memory and imagined conversations with dead parents.

98. Barbie (2023)

Greta Gerwig turned a gigantic commercial property into a film about gender, relationships, expectations and the absurdity of trying to perform an identity perfectly.

99. Anora (2024)

Sean Baker takes the Cinderella fantasy and throws it into the real world. Its central relationship asks uncomfortable questions about class, sex work, money and whether affection survives when the power imbalance becomes impossible to ignore.

100. Challengers (2024)

Luca Guadagnino turns a love triangle into a full-contact sporting event. Sex, competition and ambition become almost impossible to separate, making attraction itself feel like a form of power.

101. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Jane Schoenbrun’s film uses a blood-soaked slasher framework to offer a deeply unique exploration of queer desire, identity, and sexual fulfilment.

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