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.

Irène Jacob plays dual roles — two women connected by a mysterious bond. Deeply sensual, almost mystical. Her luminous physicality is central. Q&A with Irène Jacob on Apr 25.

Based on the famous literary hoax novel. A radio host's wife seduces various men to get revenge on her cheating husband. Metzger's most playful erotic satire. Newly restored DCP.

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.

Chen Kaige's lavish Qin-dynasty epic. Gong Li plays Lady Zhao, imperial lover sent on a doomed seduction mission to recruit an assassin. Court intrigue, forbidden romance, sweeping battles. Part of Metrograph's Gong Li retrospective.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.