Aliens, robots, holograms, fruit, gods, demons, aquatic mystery creatures and shambling doppelgangers potentially occupied by the spirit of long-disappeared FBI agents trapped between dimensions — yes, it can only be our roundup of the year’s best sex scenes! To be fair, we’ve included a couple that have human participants, but only for form’s sake. Maybe it’s because it’s a global trend, maybe because The Playlist is a hotbed of perverts, but it seems to us the movie and TV year in sex was more than usually characterized by interspecies, mystical, plant-based and/or supernatural sex, and quite a few of the more ostensibly “traditional” sex scenes that impressed us did so for very unsexy reasons (we’re not naming names, but Yorgos Lanthimos).
Anyway, all of this is to say we’ve defined “best sex scenes” not necessarily in terms of their hotness, (though some are pretty hot). More often we’ve chosen those memorable moments where characters getting it on not only provides gratification of our more prurient desires, but genuinely furthers the stories, and tells us something new about the personalities involved.
Click here for our full coverage of the best of 2017, including The Worst Films Of The Year, Best TV, Best Scores & Soundtracks, Best Cinematography, Posters, Trailers, Horror, Action Sequences, our Best Films Of The Year, Underrated and Overrated Films of the Year, Breakout Talents, and the 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2018.
20. “The Beguiled” – John & Edwina
For those of us who’ve seen Don Siegel‘s deeply kinky 1971 version, Sofia Coppola‘s take on “The Beguiled” can seem a little too chaste and restrained by comparison. But one moment it does briefly burst its banks is during the sex scene between Colin Farrell‘s recent amputee soldier and Kirsten Dunst‘s repressed teacher. The details of her capitulation to his ravishment are suggested rather than explicit — the sound of tearing fabric, and the skittering of a button across the floor, but it’s still a complicated, knotty scene in a film that could have done with more of those.
19. “Chewing Gum” – Tracey & Remi
Definitely not a candidate for sexiest sex scene of the year, but a very strong possibility for the funniest, in the second and apparently final season of Michaela Coel’s outrageous comedy, the sex-obsessed Tracey (Coel) finally, after a great deal of trying, loses her virginity. The event itself is hardly graphic, but Tracey’s trademark mixture of inexperience and intense sexual enthusiasm (“What, can’t it bend all the way round?”) makes it seem a lot dirtier than what we’re watching, and that’s before she starts tunelessly singing a pre-prepared song that includes the lyrics “Will I smile? Will I scorn? Now my hymen has been torn!” and “I don’t want this moment to be oooover, said my vulvaaaa…”
18. “The Girlfriend Experience” – Erica & Anna
“An Erica & Anna sex scene? Yes, but which one?” we hear fans of Lodge Kerrigan’s half of season 2 of “The Girlfriend Experience” cry. There’s a great deal of sex in this show — especially in Kerrigan’s storyline which makes the power/money/sex dynamic even more apparent than in season 1 by his protagonists being a high-end escort Anna (Louisa Krause) and a ruthless political lobbyist Erica (Anna Friel). But their first sexual hookup is also one of the show’s most narratively crucial, most graphic and longest — clocking in at 6 1/2 minutes it follows the encounter from quick seduction to extended shots of lovemaking amid rumpled white bedsheets to the pillow-talk aftermath. This being the chilly universe of “The Girlfriend Experience,” however, the chit-chat while atypically personal, is not at all cosy.
17. “The Untamed” – Alejandra & the alien
Amat Escalante’s bizarre hybrid of social realist docudrama and alien sex-monster sci-fi has for sure some of the more grotesque sex scenes of the year. But at a certain point, the horny-making alien creature seems to bond with sexually frustrated housewife and mother Alejandra (Ruth Ramos) and it results in a sequence in which she is wrapped in its tentacles, suspended in mid-air moaning in otherworldly orgasmic pleasure that is also weirdly beautiful, especially as shot in Manuel Alberto Claro’s gorgeous photography with some excellent CG embellishment.
16. “Twin Peaks: The Return” – Janey & Dougie
In keeping with this list’s inclination toward sex scenes that are less sexy than disturbing, we’re tempted to include the early scene in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” in which the college kid in charge of looking after the mysterious box hooks up right in front of it, only for both him and his partner to get gruesomely smooshed before climax. But actually, the sex scene that we most enjoyed was between Janey (Naomi Watts) and Dougie (Kyle MacLachlan) — even though it might not be her husband in there (something she perhaps suspects by now) her orgasmic shouts of “Dougieeeee”and his bemused grin tell us this is a mutually fulfilling sexual experience, that is also happens to be very funny to watch.