You Must Remember This

If Adrian Lyne’s Lolita became a case study of what Hollywood and America didn’t want to acknowledge about its sexualization of young girls, as the 90s came to a close the culture was full of “accepta...

At the peak of their careers, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman left Hollywood for two years to collaborate with legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick on an erotic drama that the media speculated would pull ...

In part 2 of the Eyes Wide Shut story, the movie is finally unveiled, and critics are divided on its quality, and the use of digital effects to evade an NC-17 rating. Where could Hollywood eroticism g...

In 1968, the Production Code gave way to the ratings system, and the brief legitimacy of the X-rated movie. Today we’ll focus on two massive, X-rated hits released within a year of one another in 1972...

The sleeper hit of late 1979 was Blake Edwards’s sex farce 10, a comedic vivisection of a male midlife crisis, which turned 23 year-old California girl Bo Derek into a controversial cultural phenomeno...

One of the most aesthetically influential movies of the ‘80s, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo sets a template for much of what we’re going to discuss this season: it’s about sex as a conduit for wealt...

The New Hollywood directors of the late 1960s and 70s were the first generation of Hollywood filmmakers to grow up studying Hollywood movies as art. In 1981-1982, a number of those directors made actu...

1982 saw the release of three hit high school-set comedies about sex: Porky’s, The Last American Virgin and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The only one to survive as a classic, Fast Times turned Phoebe...

While the music video was still in its infancy as a cultural phenomenon, two films were released that were accused of aping the “MTV aesthetic”: Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance, and Risky Business, which tur...

In a time of bombastic blockbusters (and Reagan’s re-election), two auteurs defy the norms by releases violent films about sexual obsession, sparking a controversial mini-trend which one critic dubs “...