18 Movies You Thought Were Trashy But Are Actually Super Classy

Based on the official trailer, Dangerous Liaisons looks like a fizzy period drama about the prolific sex lives of the French aristocracy before the French Revolution quashed their rampant excesses. Starring John Malkovich as an infamous lothario and Glenn Close as his female counterpart who use their wily cruelty to corrupt and destroy the lives of three youthful socialites, the movie indulges in plenty of bodice-ripping, but is far from the breathlessly erotic romance that many would expect from the marketing. The hint of scandal that comes with it may have something to do with the book on which it’s based. Written by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in 1782, it was a scandalous novel at the time for its frank preoccupation with sex. Stephen Frears’s 1988 movie is faithful to its source material, but the sexual content is nowhere near as explicit as other movies of the decade (or of the actors’ own filmographies) and is more a reflection of power dynamics than lust. Far from being gratuitously sensual, it’s a sophisticated, sexy portrait of manipulation gone too far. Malkovich and Close use their powers of seduction as a form of dominance and sport. They use and discard their peers without compunction and view their relationship as a good-natured rivalry fueled by a healthy dose of attraction simmering under the surface. But when Malkovich’s character catches feelings for his latest target (Michelle Pfeiffer), Close’s pride is threatened and they declare war on each other. Dangerous Liaisons delights in wealthy people behaving badly, but when things get dark, they descend into tragedy. What seems like innocent fun at the beginning of the movie has all-too-real consequences by the end, and the ruthlessness of a social circle built exclusively on appearances and reputation proves deadly. The final image of Close staring at herself in the mirror while removing her makeup, cast out by the people she once used as puppets, is haunting and dispels any notion that the movie is another shallow costume drama.

Most people know the Wachowskis for their action-packed, visually spectacular movies like The Matrix and Cloud Atlas, but in 1996, they made a splash with their feature co-directorial debut that grabbed people’s attention for different reasons. Bound is an indie neo-noir about two women, a gangster’s moll named Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and a tattooed ex-con named Corky (Gina Gershon), who strike up a romance and devise a plot to swipe millions from the mob and frame Violet’s shady boyfriend. Lesbian romances have historically been marketed and labeled as titillating romances, and Bound was no different. A review in Variety noted that most critics were focusing on the “Girl-Girl Action!” angle rather than the fast-paced genre-bending plot or grisly bloodshed. The steamy reputation of Bound may be rooted in prejudice, but it can also be attributed in part to the electric chemistry between Tilly and Gershon. Rather than being framed by the male gaze, their chemistry feels refreshingly intimate. As the Variety review pointed out, however, the Wachowskis packed much more into Bound than the crackling chemistry between its heroines. Critic Roger Ebert compared their directorial style to the neo-noir gore of the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, the witty dialogue to Woody Allen, and the slapstick comedy to the Marx Brothers. Others have compared it to Hitchcock and Billy Wilder. Like all the Wachowskis' movies, Bound is an ambitious spectacle. Unlike some of their movies, however, its plot and characters are equally riveting and fully realized. It’s an erotic and stylish thriller that doesn’t cut corners on character development or the ending.

The 2002 movie Secretary was presented as a fetish-laden, taboo-heavy erotic drama about a secretary who has a sadomasochistic relationship with her boss. The poster did most of the misleading, showing a woman bending over from behind, wearing a short skirt and heels, grasping her ankles. The tagline? “Assume the position.” Maggie Gyllenhaal admitted to being hesitant to do the film over fears that it would be “a reactionary, anti-feminist sex movie,” but she was won over by the script and director Steven Shainberg’s openness to finding a deeper meaning within the sexual content. When the movie was released, critics were surprisingly enlightened about it, though the poster and the synopsis have perpetuated a more one-dimensional reputation. Gyllenhaal plays Lee, an unassuming twenty-something who has recently spent time in a psychiatric hospital for self-harm. When her stone-faced boss, Mr. Grey (James Spader), is aroused by her submissiveness and spanks her, something is awakened, and they begin a torrid affair. While the power dynamics between a real-life boss and his secretary are questionable, the relationship between Lee and Grey is nuanced and ultimately a testament to love. Lee finds liberation in their sexual dynamic, but Grey is self-loathing and ashamed of his desires. He may be the dominant half of their relationship, but she teaches him to accept his tendencies without judgment. In the end, the movie becomes a conventional love story in which they show each other that their violent physical desires do not preclude tenderness in every other aspect of their lives. Decades after its release, Secretary remains an unusually sophisticated and playful depiction of a type of relationship that is often reduced to confused clichés by Hollywood.

Fatal Attraction is one of those '80s erotic thrillers that usually goes hand-in-hand with the word “steamy.” But while there is a torrid affair at its center, the ongoing controversy surrounding the movie is more about the demonization of Glenn Close’s character than the sexual content. Michael Douglas plays Dan, a lawyer and self-professed family man who has a brief affair with a book publisher named Alex (Close). She refuses to let him walk away from their one-night stand, and becomes increasingly insistent, unstable, and, ultimately, violent. Based on the title and publicity stills of Dan and Alex in the throes of passion, it’s reasonable to assume that “steamy” is the perfect word to describe the film, but in reality, it’s much chillier. Director Adrian Lyne is known for pushing the boundaries of sexuality in his movies. Lolita, Indecent Proposal, and 9 ½ Weeks stirred controversy for their content, but while some of Lyne’s movies could be dismissed as stylish sleaze, Fatal Attraction cannot. Love it or hate it, it’s a tightly wound thriller with a masterful performance from Close. One of the reasons the movie rises above its disappointingly moralistic ending is because Close imbues Alex with more complex motivations than hysteria and pure evil. The character comes across as fragile even when committing horrifying acts of stalking, kidnapping, and bunny murder, while Dan is largely unlikable despite being the target of her mania. Fatal Attraction was never sold as a horror movie, but it racks up an impressive number of spine-chilling jump-scares and preys on male fears of vengeful exes in a surprisingly insidious way. It’s a moody thriller with a blackened heart that sleekly combines multiple genres and stays with you long after the credits roll.

Steven Soderbergh’s groundbreaking debut, sex, lies, and videotape is true to its title, but not in the way you might expect. Andie McDowell stars as Ann, a Baton Rouge housewife in an unhappy marriage to a successful lawyer (Peter Gallagher). He’s having an affair with her younger sister (Laura San Giacomo), and when his old college friend Graham (James Spader) comes to town, Ann turns to him for an unexpected form of therapy. Graham’s fetish is interviewing women about their sex lives and watching the conversations on videotape. When Ann finally agrees to be his subject, she finds a level of intimacy through words that has been sorely missing from her marriage. The title is both accurate and misleading. Most people who think about sex and videotapes probably think about sex on videotape, but in this case, it’s conversations about sex rather than the act itself. Soderbergh, who was just 26 when the film was released, said that he thought the movie would be too European for American audiences and too dialogue-heavy for Europeans. Instead, sex, lies, and videotape won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and became one of the most revered and groundbreaking movies in independent cinema. McDowell’s magnetically self-effacing performance and frank dialogue is more intimate than the carefully choreographed, glamorously lit bedroom scenes in most erotic dramas, and Spader walks a seductive line between sinister and vulnerable. It’s a rare breed of a movie that revolves around and directly addresses sex without leering at its characters.

Richard Gere is objectified in nearly every frame of Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo. Playing a male escort named Julian who derives immense satisfaction from cars, clothes, and the contours of his own body, he is sun-kissed and feline, moving with the unhurried elegance of a man who knows he’s being admired by everyone who sees him. He enjoys pleasing women, especially those neglected by their husbands and therefore more susceptible to his professional skills. But his carefully manicured life is thrown out of balance when he develops a relationship with a politician’s wife (Lauren Hutton) and is framed for the murder of a former client. A movie about a male prostitute accused of homicide sounds especially sleazy when considering that Schrader’s previous film, Hardcore, revolved around LA’s adult film underworld, but American Gigolo has a much glossier and more romantic agenda. Rather than being a seedy movie about sex work, it’s a stylish character study about a supremely confident protagonist whose ego is brought down to earth. From the beginning of the movie, there is something tragic about Julian. Like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, he goes through an elaborate workout routine in his lifeless apartment, muscles glistening, hair falling into his eyes in just the right way, and sun streaming through the windows. Like Bateman, he owns an immaculate Armani wardrobe and treats each of his glitzy possessions with an unsettling amount of pleasure that is absent from his interpersonal relationships. As he becomes less and less in control of his life, however, he begins to lose touch with this identity. Schrader highlights glamor rather than sleaze in American Gigolo, but still manages to highlight the darkness and redemption of its main character.

The ‘80s and ’90s saw a resurgence in femme fatales modeled off performances of classic Hollywood stars like Barbara Stanwyck, Rita Hayworth, and Ava Gardner. Many of these roles appeared in erotic thrillers rather than old-fashioned neo-noirs, with actresses like Sharon Stone, Madonna, and Denise Richards engaging in explicit sex scenes. Taking things a step further, The Last Seduction was, according to its screenwriter, pitched as a soft-core movie. This, combined with its straight-to-TV release, gives the impression that the film is an even trashier erotic thriller than the low-brow exploitation flicks being churned out by major studios at the time. But nothing could be further from the truth. Linda Fiorentino stars as Bridget Gregory, a telemarketing employee who absconds with $700,000 that her abusive husband made from a drug deal. She goes on the run to a nondescript town where she takes advantage of a local insurance salesman (Peter Berg) and plots an elaborate, astonishingly sociopathic plot to rid herself of her male pests. While most '90s erotic thrillers sought to reinvent the femme fatale by adding copious sweaty sex scenes and explicit dialogue, The Last Seduction updates the character by making Bridget a sexually dominant, ruthlessly calculating, modern woman who is the protagonist rather than the villain. Fiorentino’s husky voice and chain smoking make her a femme fatale in the classic mold, but she is not the ill-fated seductress of earlier movies. Far from being trashy, the sex in the movie is an illustration of her control. From grabbing a stranger’s genitals to framing him for rape, she uses sex as a weapon without any attempt at finesse or pretense. Berg was one of the people who mistook The Last Seduction for a soft-core movie before seeing the finished product. Recalling filming an infamous scene in which Bridget aggressively pushes his character against a chain link fence to use him for sexual gratification, he said, “I thought I’d made a huge mistake and that my career and life would be over, and it turned out to be by far the best love scene that I was ever associated with in my life.” In the end, it received glowing reviews from critics and Fiorentino won the New York Film Critics Circle award for her performance. Due to the movie’s direct-to-TV release, however, she was ineligible to compete for the Oscar many believed she deserved.

Carnal Knowledge is a movie about shallow sex, partner swapping, and objectification, in which Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel play college friends seeking romantic partners over the course of 30 years. While Nicholson’s character is only interested in women’s physical attributes despite berating them for being shallow and lazy, Garfunkel’s character idealizes them to an unrealistic and self-defeating degree. When it was released in 1971, the movie’s frank depictions of physical relationships scandalized and outraged audiences. Some newspapers refused to advertise it, and in Georgia, the film reels were confiscated from a theater. The theater manager was charged with distributing obscene material, and the case made it all the way to the US Supreme Court before he was cleared of wrongdoing. The seedy reputation persists, but is a product of its time. Like Mike Nichols’s other movies that deal directly with unfulfilling sexual relationships, such as The Graduate and Closer, the edgy dialogue and flashes of skin in Carnal Knowledge are never superfluous. The movie is decades ahead of its time in its depiction of two types of toxic masculinity. Nicholson’s character dehumanizes women in overt ways by objectifying their bodies, while Garfunkel’s character dehumanizes them by putting them on a pedestal that no person could live up to. Candice Bergen, Ann-Margret, and Rita Moreno are given substantial roles to illustrate the men’s shallowness, and the sex is less titillating than alienating. By the end, when Nicholson is so desensitized that he can only be aroused by having a sex worker read from a script that exalts his masculinity, anyone hoping for a sexy romp will come away feeling cheated and thoroughly deflated. What you get instead is an unsparing portrait of the central characters' quests to find relationships that are bound to disappoint everyone involved.

Peter Greenaway’s 1989 crime romance has lost none of its shock value since it was released. A collision of filth, splendor, torture, sex, delicacy, and cannibalism, it is difficult to sit through even for those accustomed to graphic on-screen violence. It stars Michael Gambon as savage gangster Albert Spica, who has tortured his way into owning a gourmet restaurant where he gorges on the finest foods while terrorizing the staff, his fellow diners, and his wife, the regal and long-suffering Georgina (Helen Mirren). Her affair with Michael (Alan Howard), a mild-mannered bookseller and patron of the restaurant, is facilitated by the cook, but when Spica finds out, the steady stream of violence is taken to newly disturbing heights. Upon discovering Michael’s tortured corpse, Georgina and the cook prepare his body like a roast pig, and she forces her husband to eat it at gunpoint. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover is graphic in every possible way, but critics were forced to acknowledge the artistry behind it. The New York Times called it “so esthetically brilliant that it expands the boundaries of film itself,” while the Washington Post said it “treats the ugliest content imaginable in the most beautiful way possible” and was “without a doubt” the best film of the year. Part of its brilliance stems from Greenaway’s aesthetic eye. He originally attended art school to become a painter, but said he was always disappointed that paintings didn’t have soundtracks. The restaurant is dominated by a painting by the Dutch Baroque artist Frans Hals, while Jean-Paul Gauthier designed the costumes. The colors and set design are more expressive than realistic. When Georgina and Michael escape the dining room for their trysts, their costumes change with the color palette of each room, from blood-red to pure white. Many critics pointed out the strong parallels between the brutality and greed of Spica and the tail-end of the Thatcher era in Great Britain, demonstrating that, beyond the breathtaking visual style, the movie is rich with meaning. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover is a punishing film to watch, but it’s about as classy as cinema gets.

Any movie with an NC-17 rating whose title begins with “Lust” is bound to bring up certain assumptions, and it’s true that there is a lot of sexual content in Ang Lee’s 2007 period drama. But with a run time of 158 minutes, the explicit scenes are sparing and integral to the plot. Set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during WWII, it stars Tang Wei as Chia Chi, a nondescript college student who transforms into a breathtaking socialite to seduce and help assassinate Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a collaborator with the occupying enemy. Despite being dedicated to her mission, Chia Chi finds herself in an intensely passionate affair with her target, and her feelings ultimately derail the assassination. Lust, Caution was slapped with an NC-17 rating for some particularly graphic sex scenes involving both consensual and non-consensual interactions. Far from being gratuitous, however, these scenes are some of the only glimpses of honesty that the couple allows. Both Chia Chi and Mr. Yee are engaged in elaborate webs of deceit. He may even suspect that she has ulterior motives from the beginning but chooses not to tell her. Their physical relationship is as intense and explicit as they need it to be to compensate for the secretiveness and dishonesty in the rest of their lives. Without these scenes, their growing feelings would be unconvincing and lead to an unearned ending. Lee is known for his ability to mix seemingly incongruous genres, and in Lust, Caution, sex and espionage are inextricably linked, demonstrating the extremities and ruthlessness of life in a time of war.

Atom Egoyan’s 1994 drama Exotica plumbs the depths of grief, emotional intimacy, and kindness, but you wouldn’t know it from the marketing, or even the premise. Starring Bruce Greenwood as a lonely tax auditor who frequents the titular strip club to watch his favorite dancer perform in a school girl’s uniform, it takes place largely within the confines of the club where dancers move suggestively between tables over a sultry soundtrack. But Francis (Greenwood) is holding onto an endless reservoir of pain that has nothing to do with sex, and the dancer, Christina (Mia Kirshner), relies on him for comfort more than money. Their scenes together are intimate, but not particularly erotic. When she dances for him, she doesn’t even remove her clothes. The revelations in Exotica defy preconceptions. Francis has lost his young daughter to a senseless act of brutality, and Christina is still holding onto the kindness that he showed her when she was a troubled teenager babysitting his daughter. The club gives them an ironically socially acceptable excuse to see one another and acknowledge each other’s pain in a safely mediated space. Their relationship is complex, but through the predictable rituals of the club, they can ignore the implications of their need for each other and find some catharsis. Exotica enthralled critics when it was released and became one of the landmark independent movies of the '90s. It’s hypnotic, heartbreaking, seductive, and mysterious, with not a single cheap thrill in sight.

The production of Eyes Wide Shut was shrouded in secrecy and tabloid obsession. Its stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, were in a highly publicized marriage, the subject matter of the film was something to do with a married couple’s private life, and the director, Stanley Kubrick, insisted that the production be completely closed to the press. As a result, the build-up surrounding the movie involved lurid rumors of nude scenes, marital strife between the stars, and boundary-pushing sex scenes that might never see the light of day. The result was much less titillating. Kubrick, who was already considered one of the greatest directors of all time, wasn’t deviating from his artistry to make a soft-core flick as one last hurrah. His final film is cryptic, suspenseful, and dark, and has more to do with the idea of infidelity than with actual orgies. Cruise plays Bill Harford, a New York doctor who learns that his wife Alice (Kidman) has fantasies about another man who she almost left him for years before. This revelation sends him careening through the streets of Manhattan, trying and failing to have a fling despite being propositioned by almost everyone he meets. When he finally arrives at a party thrown by one of his wealthy patients that seems tailor-made for his needs, it turns out to be more of a nightmare than a sexual fantasy come to life. Kubrick’s exacting composition makes the masked orgy more clinical than erotic. It’s all bodies, but the effect is purely psychological. Bill ends up fearing for his life, fleeing the scene of a nightmare that he and the audience can’t quite believe is real. The most intimate and clear-eyed scenes in the movie are when Bill and Alice are fighting, while the scenes involving sex are surreal and laced with menace. Eyes Wide Shut sparks an unending number of potential interpretations. From sexual fantasy, infidelity, death, and abuse of power, it runs the gamut of human experiences in a way that is unsettling and surprising for anyone expecting a tantalizing parade of erotica.

David Cronenberg practically invented the body horror genre, but even those who know what to expect from his work might be repulsed by the premise of 1996’s Crash. Following a group of outsiders who are turned on by the carnage of car accidents, it ties the most gruesome details of mutilation to sexual pleasure. Starring James Spader and Holly Hunter as the latest accident victims to join the group, it features characters fetishizing mangled corpses, recreating famous car accidents, and becoming aroused from the resulting injuries. It was banned in England and the US distributor threatened not to release it. But while the sexual content is deviant by any stretch of the imagination, the movie itself is neither pornographic nor trashy, as some critics suggested. There’s a reason Crash won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s often visually repellent as almost all Cronenberg movies are, if only because it’s impossible not to imagine the physical pain it depicts, but it also recreates the compulsive watchability of real-world disasters. The director's spare, streamlined style makes every scene as propulsive and suspenseful as a car careening toward a solid wall, and the story offers a surprisingly poignant depiction of community. The group may have unusual desires, but their activities are consensual, and they find acceptance with each other. Crash cannot be categorized as trashy simply because it’s impossible to derive cheap thrills from it. You might come away feeling compassionate, confused, disgusted, or a combination of the three, but it isn't the kind of movie where you can sit back and passively enjoy the frivolous entertainment.

There was little consensus from critics regarding the 2021 direct-to-streaming erotic thriller The Voyeurs. Michael Mohan’s Rear Window and Body Double mashup was condemned as “gussied-up smut” by some and hailed by others as “a sorely needed throwback” to the heyday of sexually charged thrillers. The one thing critics could agree upon was that the movie is unwaveringly committed to showing the entangled bodies of its devastatingly attractive stars at every moment possible. Sydney Sweeney and Justice Smith play Pippa and Thomas, a young couple who move into a new apartment and become sexually voracious while spying on their neighbors. This premise inevitably dictated the movie’s trashy reputation, but all that sex does more than conjure cheap thrills. Pippa and Thomas go through a range of ethical questions while watching the couple across the street, from whether to step in to save the man from choking to whether to tell the woman that she’s being cheated on. Even as Pippa disapproves of the man’s exploits, she finds herself attracted to him and increasingly frustrated with her relationship with Thomas. She falls into the trap of believing that the grass is greener on the other side of the street, and her ultimate quest for vengeance when she’s brought back to earth is at least partially bound up in her feelings of guilt and embarrassment over how far she and Thomas let themselves get caught up in their neighbors’ affairs. The Voyeurs spices up its erotic overtones with a few bombshell twists and even conjures some unsettling associations with the addictive pleasures of social media scrolling. It’s a daringly sexy old-school thriller that, if nothing else, offers a pretty persuasive argument for reading each and every clause of your contracts before signing them.

Bad Lieutenant has all the elements of a sleazy, exploitative B-movie. A crooked cop (Harvey Keitel) does untold amounts of drugs (including snorting coke off of family photos), doubles down on gambling bets he can’t pay, and forces teenage girls to simulate sex acts in exchange for avoiding a ticket. When a nun is raped, the lieutenant goes on a drug-fueled rampage, seeking vengeance and redemption but finding only hallucinations of Christ and even more self-destruction. Director Abel Ferrara had gotten his foothold in the film industry by making pornography, but Bad Lieutenant got an NC-17 rating on its own merits. New York has never looked more degenerate or seedy, and yet, the combination of Keitel’s raw performance and Ferrara’s unflinching style leads to a movie that gets under your skin and does more than revel in its own muck. The lieutenant experiences a religious crisis when he discovers the nun has forgiven her attackers and refuses to name them. Anguished by the purity of her faith and virtue, he resolves to turn his life around but is so mired in his own hellish psyche that his path to redemption is more destructive than triumphant. Critics compared the movie’s themes of Catholicism, shame, and redemption to Martin Scorsese, but not even Scorsese went as far as Ferrara in showing the fathomless depths of vice. The results were hailed by critics, many of whom seemed surprised at Ferrara’s thoughtfulness. “What’s shocking about this dark urban fantasy,” Owen Glieberman wrote in Variety, “is that it’s driven by a true artist’s fervor.” In the New York Times, Janet Maslin echoed this sentiment, arguing that Bad Lieutenant “would seem outrageously, unforgivably lurid if it were not also somehow perfectly sincere.”

James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet, hasn’t left much of a cultural footprint since it was released in 1990. Based on a novel by Jim Thompson, an author known for his hardboiled pulp fiction, it follows a familiar film noir tale of a down-on-his-luck protagonist with a shady past who is seduced by a dangerous woman in a dead-end desert town. Jason Patric stars as the man in question, a former boxer and mental institution escapee who falls for a young widow played by Rachel Ward. Her “uncle” is played by Bruce Dern, a deceptively easy-going ex-cop with a knack for crime. They devise a plot to kidnap the son of a wealthy family, but, as so often happens in film noir, things do not go as planned, and the reluctant protagonist gets the short end of the stick. It’s a movie of seedy safe houses and dive bars, tough guys, and world-weary drifters. The tropes are all there, but After Dark, My Sweet, rises above its references to other movies and is a surprisingly moving drama with three-dimensional characters. For one thing, Patric’s character, Collie, is a much more vulnerable protagonist than most heroes of hardboiled crime. He isn’t a tough guy who’s susceptible to dangerous women. He’s a mentally unstable loner who is as capable of tenderness and self-doubt as he is of horrific violence. There are moments when he seems more akin to the boy he’s kidnapped than to his co-conspirators. Ward’s character, Fay, is also more nuanced than a straightforward femme fatale. She’s proactive in her pursuit of Collie, but her intention isn’t to use and destroy him. In the end, he recognizes her inherent goodness and protects her in the only way he can, an ending that is built so subtly and masterfully that it comes as a shock but also feels like the only possible outcome. After Dark, My Sweet may be a largely forgotten gem, but anyone who has seen it will not have forgotten the ice pick of an ending. The fact that the movie bears all the hallmarks of trashy neo-noir makes it all the more surprising when it turns out to be something much deeper.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris provoked outcry from all sides when it was released in 1972. Starring Marlon Brando as Paul, a recently widowed middle-aged American who carries on a tortured, at times violent, affair with a 20-year-old Parisian woman (Maria Schneider), it is full of nudity, graphic sex, and explicit language. Outraging conservatives for its sexual content and liberals for its blatant misogyny, it received an X rating from censors, which some critics believed was not harsh enough. Most movies that are scandalous at the time of their release seem almost quaint in comparison to modern standards, but the controversy surrounding Last Tango in Paris has only grown with time, largely due to Schneider’s revelation that the infamous rape scene in which Brando’s character uses butter as a hasty lubricant was sprung on her without warning. “I was crying real tears,” she said. The director explained that the spontaneity of the scene was paramount because he wanted Schneider’s “reaction as a girl, not as an actress.” This troubling legacy cannot be separated from the movie, but even at the time of its release, Last Tango in Paris had passionate advocates who pointed to its painfully powerful exploration of grief and intimacy. Most of the praise was directed at Brando’s performance, which features several emotionally raw scenes that are some of the most moving of his career. Famed New Yorker critic Pauline Kael called his performance “intuitive, rapt, [and] princely,” and argued that it, combined with Bertolucci’s direction achieves "realism with the terror of actual experience still alive on the screen.” The realism is what makes the movie arguably more than the sum of its provocations. Paul is a mess of emotional anguish, full of rage and grief over the suicide of his wife with no understanding of how to purge it from his system without weaponizing it. It’s uncomfortable to sit through, but intentionally so. Bertolucci went on to win multiple Oscars and stir further controversy with his later films, but Last Tango in Paris remains his most hotly debated movie.

Infamously dubbed by its own distributor as “a sick movie made by sick people for sick people,” Bad Timing was saddled with a trashy reputation even before it hit theaters. Starring Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell as two Americans in Vienna who carry on a lengthy affair despite having opposite personalities, it defined the term “toxic relationship” before it was part of the common parlance. The movie is told in flashbacks leading up to the ominous opening scene in which Milena is in an ambulance after apparently trying to take a fatal OD. Alex is a person of interest in the case, and this frame makes the dysfunction of their relationship all the more foreboding. It was the ending that shocked audiences. Alex watches Milena collapse unconscious from an overdose and then violates her instead of calling for help. Such a scene would normally go beyond the mark of harmless trash into the realm of senseless shock value, but director Nicolas Roeg cannot be so easily dismissed, and Bad Timing has fascinated audiences as much as repulsed them for decades. The movie could be considered exploitative and tasteless if Roeg had made it fun and forgettable. But he didn’t. It’s painful, almost excruciating at times, and more than a little creepy in places, but it sweeps you along on a flurry of frenzied emotion and disorienting leaps in time in a way that seems mathematically formulated to hold your attention. Roeg’s previous movies stirred up their own controversies. From the ultra-violent, psychedelically sexual Performance to a particularly graphic sex scene in Don’t Look Now, he had been challenging audiences and ratings boards for a full decade before Bad Timing made it to theaters. His haunting, experimental style helped mark a shift in British filmmaking, and he is still considered one of the great auteurs of the era. Bad Timing is a particularly challenging example of his work. It isn’t a tidy story with easy answers, but it’s an intoxicating puzzle that reveals uncomfortable truths about human nature.