The 6 Best Sex Movies of 2024

The year’s hottest movie so far simply would not work without sex. The against-a-pockmarked-wall grittiness of it grounds the movie before more fantastical elements that transpire (particularly in the third act). Said sex is also shorthand for establishing the devotion between the mulleted gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) and the aspiring bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian), the latter of whom rolls into town with little more than some striped workout shorts and a dream. Director Rose Glass understands the erotic potential in gym culture—a montage set to German synth act Gina X Performance’s “Nice Mover” glides between Jackie going down on Lou with rigor and Jackie getting in a good pump. The sequence’s pièce de résistance features a slowed shot of Jackie drinking a protein shake that drips down her throat—as the camera pans down, we see Lou licking it off her chest.

The administration of steroids is the pair’s foreplay—as they’re still getting to know each other, Lou offers Jackie what she claims is some leftover juice. (Is that even a thing in a meathead gym?) Jackie hesitates but relents. “Where do you want it?” asks Lou. “In the butt,” says Jackie. Saucy! We see Lou penetrating her with the needle. They’re making out seconds later. The ensuing sex is sweaty and messy and lit with a through-the-curtains golden light that looks like the product of an eclipse (and, true to form, scored with another incredible smutty synth track: Patrick Cowley’s “Mutant Man”). It’s like nothing else in the world exists but these two women and the pleasure they’re exchanging. Maybe the most erotic (and in terms of sex onscreen, unique) scene occurs when Lou asks Jackie to show her how she masturbates. (“Do you put your fingers inside when you fuck yourself? How do you do it?”) Jackie’s standing and Lou’s at crotch level—the intimacy couldn’t be more direct. The sex in Love Lies Bleeding is intense, though presented in relatively short scenes. Via that, Glass distinguishes between explicit and gratuitous. The characters’ strong sexual connection is essential to understanding the choices Lou makes as Jackie’s roid rage has her spiraling out of control. Eventually the movie goes with her. We stay along for the ride because of the heat generated in the first act. Truly a master class in sex onscreen.

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Nate Dushku’s low-budget Birder finds serial killer Kristian (Michael Emery) wreaking havoc while frequently nude at a clothing-optional queer campground. It features dicks galore and scenes of explicit sex—in a cabin, in a tent, on a river’s shore, in some forest dirt. The guys (and some girls) don’t cruise; they just do it. The casualness with which they discuss and engage in sex is something media rarely bothers to get right about contemporary queer life. Birder has a rough-around-the-edges quality that, while sometimes at odds with contemporary notions of “quality,” hearkens back to the scrappiness of early-’90s new queer cinema. And like many of those now-classics, Birder is a movie that has as much to say as it does skin to show. The manner in which Kristian is able to move in on and exterminate his prey is a subtle commentary on the inherent vulnerability in anonymous-sex settings.

Writer-director Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer is so French they should serve it with a baguette. It’s a kind of obsessively nuanced morality tale featuring a knockout, sphinx-like performance from Léa Drucker as Anne. Anne’s a lawyer in what appears to be family court, frequently representing clients who allege abuse. Despite her job, she’s a devoted wife of Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) and the mother of two adopted daughters. Her selfless sense of duty is challenged when Pierre’s 17-year-old son from a previous marriage, Théo (Samuel Kircher), moves in with them and … well, Anne would probably say he seduces her (a woman more than twice his age), but much of what actually goes down is up to the viewer to decide. What Anne does is legally sound yet ethically askew. Can a woman who has conducted a life so selflessly be defined by a single act of selfishness? Can good people do bad things, or do those bad things make them bad people? And Anne’s motivation is underplayed—we see her having sex with Pierre in an early scene, though she talks practically the whole time about an old guy she had a crush on in her youth. Is she dissatisfied? Bored? Keeping the fire going? This close to unleashing an inner bad girl that had been just waiting to come out? Breillat has the good sense to keep this unclear.

Last Summer is a remake of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts. The predecessor was far more sexually explicit. Breillat’s sex is often shot from the shoulders up with a static camera. (The first time Anne and Théo have sex, we are focused on his face; the next time it’s hers we watch.) Though the sex here isn’t explicit, this is a movie explicitly about the taboo sex that’s taking place between stepmother and stepson. Breillat doesn’t seem to judge Anne, but she does let her character sit and stew in her predicament for what becomes an uncomfortable amount of time. This is an open-minded movie that asks a lot of questions and seems specifically designed to avoid knee-jerk social-media judgments that are so common today. It’s not an erotic thriller, but it feels very much like the product of a sensibility rooted in the early ’90s.

Glen Powell is on the A-list precipice, so it’s refreshing to see him in roles with at least a bit of an edge. In Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, he plays Gary Johnson, a seemingly mild-mannered professor at the University of New Orleans who does undercover work for the cops, posing as a hit man for sting operations to effectively entrap people who want other people dead. He dissuades the arresting Madison (Adria Arjona) from pursuing her husband’s murder, and there starts an affair predicated on her perception of him as a bad boy via the character he cultivated for his job, Ron. In a nuanced commentary on the psychology of sex, Madison’s perception of Gary affects his performance.

“I was once told I think too much to be a good lover," goes a voice-over monologue. “She said exceptional sex requires a lack of thought, a certain amount of animal abandon. I liked Ron. He wasn’t a thinker. He was a doer.” And then Gary does Madison all over the house. The sex is brief and largely shot from the neck up, but it includes-role play (Madison dresses as a flight attendant), lots of Dirty Dancing–esque postcoital pillow talk, and a scene in which Glen and Madison are intertwined and she pours wine from a glass on herself as he licks her. The chemistry between Powell and Arjona is undeniable. The section of Hit Man that showcases several scenes of sexual encounters to underscore the importance of sex to their burgeoning relationship is something many movies take for granted. Hit Man could have gotten away with far less eroticism, but it’s better, hotter, and more realistic for going there.

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Joanna Arnow wrote, directed, edited, and starred in this ’90s-indie-quirkfest throwback about a submissive woman named Ann who floats from dom to dom. What is she looking for? That’s the problem! The Feeling That… presents a kind of sub’s dilemma—as Ann explains to one date, she waits for other people to order when dining out so that she doesn’t order the wrong thing and find herself jealous when the food arrives. She’s that submissive. Having any kind of idea what she actually wants in a relationship is too tall an order for her. Much of the time we spend with her is in the company of her dom Allen (Scott Cohen), who orders her to do all number of degrading (yet kind of dull) things, like lick his nipple and then run and stand against a wall repeatedly while naked. Disaffected masturbation ensues (one time, for another dom, in a “fuck pig” costume—a plastic pig nose, a bunny-ears headband, a ball gag, a bikini top, and bells on so that he can hear her going at herself) and perhaps the most awkward blowjob scene in the history of cinema. Ann finally meets a handsome, chill guy, Chris (Babak Tafti), whom she decides she wants as more than a sex friend and even starts to top him from the bottom, but, uh, don’t expect much satisfaction from this one. It would be unfair and cut audience empathy, as Ann certainly isn’t getting any.

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The mere presence of sex onscreen was enough to make ’80s and ’90s cinema “controversial,” but by 2017 it was the absence of it in Call Me by Your Name that had tongues wagging. Specifically the camera panning away from Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) as they consummate their simmering attraction. It was a conscious act of circumnavigation that director Luca Guadagnino was asked about for years—“To put our gaze upon their lovemaking would have been a sort of unkind intrusion,” he said at the 2017 New York Film Festival, for example. Still, many wondered if he, a gay man himself, was evincing a certain squeamishness toward gay sex, especially because the most explicit sex in the movie (a love story between men) was straight.

Challengers similarly skimps on sex, technically, but the effect is way less distracting thanks to the considerable heat generated by stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist. The movie gets about as explicit as having them kiss, though the kissing is deep and passionate enough to give the impression that both of these guys are truly into Zendaya. Each other? Not so much, but that’s kind of what’s so hot about it. In the flashback scene in which tennis star Tashi visits the hotel room of the decidedly less accomplished players (and best friends) Patrick and Art, she orders them to kiss, and they do. This does nothing to make things weird between them (they’re comfortable enough that Patrick slaps Mike’s boxer-clad boner after Tashi leaves him excited and unrelieved). They continue their close friendship (so close that at times they have conversations with their faces inches away) at least for a while—eventually, Tashi comes between them. But the story is less focused on her individual relationships with them than the one the two men share. Challengers is a movie about intimacy, specifically intimacy among men—that which may include sexual contact but generally transcends it. It’s about the extent to which the guys know each other, the way they look deep into each other’s eyes, their warm dynamic, the brotherly love so clear that it doesn’t need to be spoken out loud. Challengers is not a sex movie, by any stretch, but it is unmistakably sexy.

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