Despite the accessibility of erotica, audiences still seek out the more substantial approaches to sex that only narrative cinema can offer. Here you’ll find the full array, from provocative avant-garde explorations of lust and desire to the saucy sex comedy.
When Christine (Julie Walters) is unable to pay her landlord rent, she has to get creative. Based on the real-life experiences of Cynthia Payne, Personal Services is the raunchy comedy that isn't afraid to say sex! As Christine becomes the madame of a suburban brothel, with older men as her clien...
Ken Russell returns to the author of one of his greatest triumphs, D.H Lawrence, for a prequel to Women in Love that showcases the singular director’s flair for romantic flamboyance and erotic power. Ursula (Sammi Davis) finds herself falling for her swimming and gym teacher Winifred (Amanda Dona...
The first major British gay film, this study of a closeted schoolteacher who spends his nights cruising London's gay clubs in search of Mr Right defies categorisation. Both a fascinating glimpse into the 1970s scene and a portrait of an ordinary gay man living in a homophobic society, Nighthawks ...
It is 1892, and Oscar Wilde (Nickolas Grace) is enjoying the company of his lover, Bosey, and other young men in a brothel. While he does so, workers put on an elaborate production of Wilde's banned play, Salome. In the play, King Herod begs his stepdaughter to dance for him, however, her mother ...
Joe Orton’s delicious tale of suburban perversity, in which a lascivious landlady and her gay brother attempt to seduce the titular tenant, who happens to be a psychopath, was first staged in 1964 and adapted for the BBC in 1968. Two years later Douglas Hickox directed this feature film version, ...
For this remarkable experimental film, the provocative avant-garde legend Stephen Dwoskin gathered together a group of strangers and filmed them as they explored their fantasies over a period of five days: a project that now sounds a little like TV's Big Brother. The ceremonial gowns and make-up ...
In a remote corner of England's Peak District, a mysterious skull is unearthed. But even weirder is that Lady Sylvia steals the skull for use in worshipping - very erotically - her pagan god, The White Worm, who hungers for the taste of virginal flesh. Ken Russell has great fun revelling in the d...
Made thirteen years after Britain’s first major gay film Nighthawks, Strip Jack Naked puts the earlier film into an historical and personal context, with director Ron Peck drawing on his own journey from closeted suburban teen to politically radicalised filmmaker. A lucid account of the responsib...
Set in Victorian England, The Nightcomers follows two orphans - Flora and Miles - as they are left by their tutor in a mansion, under the care of the elderly housekeeper Mrs Grose, the governess Miss Jessel, and the groundskeeper Peter Quint. When Grose attempts to have the master of the house fi...
After receiving an anonymous tip, a policeman ( Edward Woodward ) travels to the Scottish island of Summerisle to search for a missing girl. When he arrives, the Islanders, most of whom seem to be practising pagans, claim to have never seen or heard of the young girl. The mystery leads to our pro...
Peter Sellers gives a rare - and remarkable - dramatic performance as Benjamin Hoffman, a lonely middle-aged businessman who blackmails a beautiful young secretary (Sinead Cusack) into spending a week with him. But what begins as a seemingly sinister ordeal will slowly reveal itself to be an unco...
Transience and desire, and the silence and concealment surrounding sexuality, love, death, AIDS, and the fear of bereavement, are all touched upon among a rush of abstract and allegorical connections in this artist film from 1990 by Anna Thew.
When a young poet (Michael Gothard, the brilliant character actor who excelled in films such as The Devils and The Valley Obscured by Clouds) hires a marketing company to turn his suicide into a mass-media spectacle, he finds that his subversive intentions are quickly diluted into a reactionary g...
