1. Love on a real train, Risky Business (1983)
To celebrate the success of their suburban brothel, Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay hop on the Chicago el and wait for their car to empty. While Tangerine Dream plays on the soundtrack and the city lights flicker through the windows, they grind against each other, enjoying the feeling of power and abandon that comes with being flush with cash and in the know. Is it any wonder that the younger brother in last year's The Squid And The Whale listened to the music from this scene while he gazed at himself in the mirror, concocting his latest masturbation fantasy?
2. Friends with benefits, Y Tu Mamá; También (2001)
At the end of a long road trip, the simmering sexual tension between older woman Ana López Mercado and teenage buddies Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal spontaneously breaks down in a small room, as the boys simultaneously strip and caress Mercado. Briefly, she seems eager to accommodate them simultaneously, but then she gently guides them together and slips downward out of the frame. Their initial awkwardness with each other rapidly gives way to the same eagerness they approached her with, and both awkwardness and eagerness are sweetly charming but rivetingly intense.
3. Dare or dare, Secret Things (2002)
In Jean-Claude Brisseau's art-smut favorite Secret Things, stripper Coralie Revel teaches bartender Sabrina Seyvecou how to own her sexuality so the two of them can embark on a campaign of man-baiting vengeance. But first come the training exercises, starting with a scene in which Revel commands Seyvecou to masturbate to orgasm, with step-by-step instructions. By the time Seyvecou throws back her bedspread and emits her last breathy moan, she isn't the only one completely enthralled.
4. Love and the Mona Lisa, Betty Blue (1986)
Say what you will about Jean-Jacques Beineix's tale of doomed love—that it's shallow, that its characters change from scene to scene, that it prioritizes visual snap above all other elements, that it's the perfect example of an art film successful only because of its sexual content—there's still no denying that its first scene is a grabber. Stars Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle make loud, passionate love as the camera slowly draws closer, never cutting away in spite of the 1980s' stylistic trend for sex scenes filled with gratuitous music-video-inspired cuts. It feels like the scene will never end as the pair find levels of passion rarely reached by human beings. Meanwhile, a print of the Mona Lisa looks on from above.
5. Dressing with their clothes off, Don't Look Now (1973)
In the middle of a terrifying psychic thriller, director Nicolas Roeg presents an utterly convincing portrait of how married couples interact behind closed doors, ending in a love scene that develops as naturally as the next breath. As a precursor, Roeg shows Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in a Venice hotel room, joking and casually padding around the bathroom, with Christie poking fun at Sutherland's love handles. Once in the bedroom, they reading the newspaper together, she starts caressing his back, and things… just… happen. Always one to experiment in the editing room, Roeg intercuts their vigorous lovemaking with shots of them getting dressed afterward, looking sated and ready to carry on with the evening. He finds eroticism in the ordinary.
6. Who's seducing who?, The Hunger (1983)
Catherine Deneuve is a beautiful, immortal, apparently powerful vampire. Susan Sarandon… well, isn't. But when Sarandon enters Deneuve's lair, it's suddenly unclear who's in charge. Acknowledging Deneuve's intent even before Deneuve is ready to admit to it, Sarandon responds with an "Oops, I have somehow spilled wine on my nice white shirt, I guess I'll have to take it off now" routine that would seem ridiculously contrived in a porn movie. But she executes it with languid, knowing desire, making it entirely clear that the subsequent gauzy but graphic encounter is a meeting between sexual equals, not a simple horror-movie predator-prey clinch. In the film version of The Celluloid Closet, Sarandon takes direct credit for that reading of the scene and her character; in the original draft, she was supposed to be very drunk and drawn in against her will, but Sarandon correctly estimated the effect that a more deliberate, calculated sensuality would have on the film.
7. Triple exposure, Grand Prix (1966)
Though best remembered for the brilliantly conceived and executed racing sequences—created in a collaboration between director John Frankenheimer and designer Ron Bass—Grand Prix also contains a tasteful but surprisingly frank love scene between Yves Montand and Eva Marie Saint. As light bachelor-pad music plays, Montand shows Saint around his elegant apartment. He asks whether she's tired, she pointedly says "No," and then Frankenheimer superimposes a blurry shot of them caressing each other's naked bodies in bed. Then, over that, he superimposes a shot of them buttoning up their clothes and smoothing out the sheets. Talk about speed.
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