The Best Sex Scenes Of 2017

15. “Princess Cyd” – Cyd & Katie
Stephen Cone’s microscopically small indie may be too low-blood-pressure for some, but if you’re on its sincerely humanist, gentle wavelength, it’s one of the year’s sweetest, honest coming-of-age films. Centering on the goodnatured but also tactless and often self-centered Cyd (Jessie Pinnick) as she goes to stay with her aunt following the death of her mother, its gentle arc resolves when Cyd finally has sex with Katie (Malic White) her mohawked barista girlfriend. Things happen along the way to all three characters, but mostly this is a remarkably un-contrived portrayal of growing up in the pauses between life’s big dramas. And Cyd’s reward is the kind of joyful, giggly but extremely turned-on sex of which the callow youth she was at the film’s beginning would not have been capable.

14. “Dear White People” – Sam & Gabe
In Justin Simien’s clever Netflix series, which follows a group of black students at a predominantly white school, provocative radio host Samantha White (2017 Playlist breakout actress Logan Browning) is the face of bold, feminist afrocentricity on campus. Everyone assumes she’s hooking up with Reggie (Marque Richardson), her male counterpart, but Sam’s got a dark, dirty secret that’s actually pretty light. The sex scene is a brilliant reveal, Sam’s bff asking her what she’s up to tonight, Reggie doing the same and then a cut to Sam’s bedroom, air thick with groans, as we glimpse hip posters on the wall and Malcolm X books on the bedside table. Sam is writhing in ecstasy on top of some lucky guy and then boom: cut to reveal that Sam’s actually hooking up with Gabe (John Patrick Amedori), a privileged white dude on campus. Their post-coital scene is romantic and sweet; a nice cap off to this astute subversion of expectations. The ramifications of the relationship so neatly laid out here will rock the entire season, starting when Gabe inadvertently reveals their secret to the world on Instagram later on.

13. “Lady Macbeth” – Katherine & Sebastian
Perhaps more than the Shakespearean associations of the title, William Oldroyd‘s precise and perverse “Lady Macbeth” shares plenty of DNA with DH Lawrence‘s “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” not least in the young bride and lady of the manor, Katherine (Florence Pugh) finding the sexual gratification her older husband does not provide in the arms of a stable hand, Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis). The fact that she first catches him with her maid, and their relationship quickly progresses from that passionate, abandoned first encounter in her bedchamber, to borderline S&M obsessive, adds a clever bondage metaphor to the corsetry and containment that defines her existence as a 19th century woman.

12. “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” – John & Anna
If we’re ranking sex scenes in terms of hotness, this one would plunge us right down into the negative numbers, down to where molecules stop vibrating altogether. But the iciness and sterility of this deeply disturbing sex scene is also what gives it its strange power, as Nicole Kidman‘s lingerie-clad, opthalmologist wife and Colin Farrell‘s slightly schlubby surgeon husband indulge in their extremely unusual “usual.” She pretends to be anaesthetized like one of his patients, while he climbs on top of her to have intercourse, and while it does nothing for one’s libido, it does provoke a firestorm of questions about the nature of sexual perversion and what intimacy would look like if everyone on the planet were basically some form of sociopath.

11. “Beach Rats” – Frankie & Michael
So much of Eliza Hittman‘s woozy coming-of-age story unfolds in a slightly tripped-out haze, that it’s often hard to separate the sex scenes — gay and straight — from the hormonal confusion and dissipation that surrounds them. But one encounter does stand out, for its casual intimacy, and that’s the one between Harris Dickinson‘s sexually uncertain teen and Michael (Eric Potempa), the older guy he picks up online for a tryst in a cheap motel. The scene culminates in Michael examining the length of Frankie’s fingers to “prove” that he’s gay and it’s a rare moment of charged intimacy that encapsulates so much of the film’s themes of uncertainty, hesitance and sexual ambivalence.