Wong Kar-wai's segment from Eros, in its standalone extended cut. Gong Li as a high-end Hong Kong courtesan who teaches a young tailor (Chang Chen) about desire — fingers, silk, the cut of cloth against skin. Arguably Wong's most nakedly erotic film.

A 19-year-old postal clerk obsessively watches his beautiful neighbor through a telescope. Voyeurism, longing, and the raw vulnerability of desire. Expanded from Dekalog VI.

Rohmer's summery "Comedies and Proverbs" entry — 15-year-old Pauline watches her older cousin navigate a coastal web of adult seductions. Bare skin, sun, moral comedy. Jack Harlow's pick in the Roxy Selects series.

Adapted from Violette Leduc's boarding-school novel — two teenage girls' awakening passion at a French finishing school, photographed by Metzger with candlelit romanticism rather than leer. The film that set the template for his later "art erotica."

Gong Li as a young bride sold to an impotent dye-mill owner who takes his nephew as her secret lover. Crimson silks, steam, forbidden desire — banned in China for years.

Tinto Brass's pre-Caligula Italian freakout — a runaway bride and a counterculture prophet barrel through libidinous tableaux of sex, death, and absurdity. Anthology's Pierre Clémenti tribute reclaims Brass as the psychedelic erotomaniac he was.

Two neighbors (Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung) discover their spouses are having an affair and form their own achingly restrained, unconsummated intimacy in 1962 Hong Kong. Peak erotics-of-restraint cinema.

New Park Chan-wook. A laid-off corporate worker resorts to murderous extremes — carrying the director's signature perverse, stylized sensuality even when the genre is dark comedy.

A young female chef encounters her abuser and lures him into an affair through her mastery of Thai cuisine. Erotic revenge thriller shot by Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai's DP). Stars Tadanobu Asano.

A writer in Paris is drawn into a dom/sub triangle by a mysterious woman and her young "slave." Adapted from the pseudonymous novel by Catherine Robbe-Grillet. Metzger's most artistically ambitious erotic film.

A Sicilian laborer's comically catastrophic quest for erotic vengeance on the man who slept with his wife. Wertmüller's bawdy, earthy sex-politics farce. New 4K restoration.

Donald Sutherland as an existentially exhausted Casanova drifting through Fellini's theatrical pageant of decadent 18th-century eros. Lavish, dreamlike, lonely.

Bertolucci's Dostoevsky-adapting Paris '68 freakout, with Pierre Clémenti as a doppelgänger-haunted shy theater student whose aggressive alter ego pushes him toward revolutionary and sexual transgression. Heavy with early Bertolucci's erotic menace.

A Manhattan madame training her younger sister in the trade. Metzger's last and most ornate hardcore — all velvet, chandeliers, and signature class. Part of the Rialto Report retrospective.

Irène Jacob plays dual roles — two women connected by a mysterious bond. Deeply sensual, almost mystical. Her luminous physicality is central.

A homicide detective becomes dangerously enthralled by the widow he's investigating. A hypnotic, fully-clothed erotic thriller — desire as surveillance. Park Chan-wook's most restrained and most romantic film.

17th-century viola da gamba master Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe (Jean-Pierre Marielle) vs his ambitious student Marin Marais (Gérard Depardieu). Father/daughter longing, forbidden love, and the erotics of music and mourning. Luminous.

A Shanghai videographer narrates the obsessive story of a motorcycle courier searching for his lost lover — who may now be a mermaid-costumed bar dancer. Melancholic, sensuous noir-romance.

A broken Korean everyman's life told in reverse — from his late-40s breakdown back through the doomed love that shaped him. Lee's sensuous-sorrowful melodrama preceded Oasis and set the template for his quiet Korean eroticism.

Two Peking Opera stars' half-century entanglement — one playing the courtesan to the other's king, their personal and political intimacies colliding through the Cultural Revolution. Gong Li as the brothel-born woman between them. Palme d'Or.

A blocked master painter (Michel Piccoli) is lured back to his abandoned masterpiece by a young model (Emmanuelle Béart, nude for much of the film). Four hours of intimate labor — charcoal on skin, posture, silence, heat. The definitive film about eros in the act of creation.

A recently discharged mental patient (Antonio Banderas) kidnaps a former porn actress (Victoria Abril) to make her love him. Almodóvar's most infamous provocation — a perverse, candy-colored Stockholm-syndrome romance that earned NC-17 before NC-17 existed.

Inside the lantern-lit brothels of 1890s Shanghai, courtesans and their patrons (Tony Leung) negotiate jealousy, contracts and slow-burning desire in long opium-haze takes. Hypnotic, achingly sensuous.

Tony Leung's Chow Mo-wan drifts through charged affairs (Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, Faye Wong) while writing an erotic sci-fi novel. Continuation of In the Mood for Love's themes — dense with desire, smoke, and regret.

A young resistance agent in WWII Shanghai seduces and plots to assassinate a ruthless collaborator (Tony Leung). NC-17 sex scenes among the most explicit in any prestige film. Venice Golden Lion winner.

Ip Man (Tony Leung) and Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi) share one of the most erotically charged non-touches in 21st century cinema — a kung fu film that is secretly a romance of thwarted desire.

A Saigon cyclo driver falls into a crime gang run by a silent, brooding poet-pimp (Tony Leung) who grooms the driver's sister for sex work. Fever-dream eroticism. Venice Golden Lion winner.

Two lovelorn Hong Kong cops (Tony Leung + Takeshi Kaneshiro) and the mysterious women who orbit them. More sensual than explicit — Faye Wong's stalkery romance with Leung is pure longing.