Standing in the hall was this sweet young freshman girl with her parents bringing her to her new dorm room! seconds of footage and intercutting the sex with scenes of the couple getting dressed to go out afterwards (a technique that prefigured the great Clooney-Lopez love scene in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight).

For every scene of ejaculatory gunfire or sexually-charged skydiving is a knife-edge action sequence to please the purists, for every chortle-worthy line of dialogue (“You want me so bad it’s like acid in your mouth! It may be regarded as a masterpiece now, but on its release in 1960, Michael Powell’s twisted horror movie was met with universal outrage.Brokeback Mountain took a different slant, casting Hollywood’s two best and most cherished young actors as a pair of on-off lovers forced by society into various states of repression, self-loathing and soul-destroying frustration. Rumours have persisted that the sex was unsimulated, and although all parties strenuously deny any such claims, it’s easy to see why: it is starkly realistic. Ostensibly a horror movie with bite, Justine’s journey from vegetarian to meat-lover also mirrors her descent into the desire for other kinds of flesh.

And what it says, in its many nipple shots, arse close-ups, and vaginal teases, is that perhaps all sex scenes, no matter how well-intended, or how groundbreaking and profound, are inherently, well, kind of sleazy.Female prostitutes had long been a fixture in the movies but the idea of a man selling his body was largely uncharted territory for a prudish Hollywood that had been conditioned by three decades of the Hays Code. Abdellatif Kechiche’s rigorously erotic three-hour romance initially spawned Cannes walkouts before picking up the Palme d’Or,split three ways between Kechiche and his starsAdele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, proof of the level of dedication all three of them poured into a wild (read: maybe even nightmarish) shoot. Based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel 2002 “The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures,” the film bravely and brazenly turns its taboo subject matter—the sexual awakening of a teenage girl—into a funny, smart, and honest story that entertains as much as it educates. But in terms of pop-culture drawing up a response to the issues of the time, there can surely be few better case studies. And so arrived an onslaught of uncritical violence carried out by Arnie, Sly and their legions of straight-to-video imitators.

Dee Rees’ lauded feature debut (based on her short of the same name) is a revelatory look inside the fraught coming-of-age of Brooklyn teen Alike (Adepero Oduye), as she conceals her sexual desires— and, in many ways, her entire identity— as outside forces push her to be honest about what she wants. And his warped urges are in turn tied up in the idea of observing: when his neighbour Helen kisses him, he bizarrely kisses the lens of his camera. But most interesting is the genre’s treatment of women, which in most cases was a straightforward updating of the femme fatale – the unchaste evildoers of film noir – but in some instances was a bit more thoughtful.Looking back now, of course, Cruel Intentions is about as openly adolescent as they come (“How are things down under? Over the course of the 1980s, as Reaganite America chomped its cigars and flexed its economic muscle, one genre above all others emerged at the fore of Hollywood: the ultra-macho action movie. So it made the cutesy girl-on-girl action in Bound (2006) and Mulholland Drive (2001) seem dubious and cheap. He was abused as a child, doesn't like to be touched, and in almost every other way possible he articulates the character template for Fifty Shades of Grey's Christian Grey. The film’s final shot, of the two women laid in bed together as a perfect mirror-image of one another, offers sex as a grand, multi-layered metaphor.

And besides, it wore its period setting lightly: bar the odd instance of disco-era fashion and dodgy décor, its frontiers setting meant it could easily be set in the contemporary US. In a panic, I threw a blanket — or something — over my girlfriend, grabbed my pants and tried to pull them on as I headed for the door to keep it from opening. Boogie Nights resisted the easy narrative in favour of a story about everyday people who meet at work, form bonds and surf the waves of a fast-changing industry with youthful cheer.On seeing the scene Warren Beatty, Christie’s then partner, flew to London to insist it was cut from the final edit. The Oedipus complex, as wince-inducingly taboo as it may be, has not gone wholly unaddressed by mainstream cinema.