Or Titane, this year's Palme d'Or winner, whose gender-fluid sexual hijinks have made it an arthouse sensation. To be sure, there will always be movies like the recent madcap musical Annette, the first film in English by French auteur Leos Carax, in which his stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard sing while performing oral sex. That half-point decline is massive in relative terms, considering almost four times as many films have been released in the 2010s as in the 1990s.' Sex in cinema peaked in the 1990s, the heyday of the erotic thriller, with 1.79% of all films featuring sex scenes. That percentage is the lowest since the 1960s. As Hagen writes: 'Only 1.21% of the 148,012 feature-length films released since 2010 contain depictions of sex. Using data from IMDB, she found that statistically, there are fewer sex scenes in mainstream motion pictures currently than there have been at any point in the past 50 years. So is Verhoeven right? Is Hollywood really taking a turn toward sexlessness? According to research done in 2019 by writer Kate Hagen, the answer is: yes. Suffice to say, the man knows something about depicting sex in the movies. Verhoeven clearly hasn't lost his transgressive touch, either: at this year's New York Film Festival, a Catholic group came to protest his depiction of 17th-Century lesbian nuns in Benedetta. Although he began making movies in his native Netherlands in the late 1970s, his move to the Hollywood mainstream maintained the same taste-and boundary-pushing flavour, from Basic Instinct's notorious interrogation scene to the vulgarity of the maligned Showgirls (1995), all the way up to his recent drama about sexual consent, Elle (2017). After all, Verhoeven helped define the 90s erotic thriller, and has been a filmmaker interested in outré sexuality from the word go. I'm always amazed people are shocked by sex in movies.'įor some film critics, who have been lamenting what they perceive to be Hollywood's new Puritanism for some time, hearing this from Verhoeven seemed to feel like vindication.

Sexuality is the most essential element of nature. I think there's a misunderstanding about sexuality in the United States. Asked why films like his 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct weren't being made in Hollywood anymore, he said, 'There's been a general shift towards Puritanism. This summer, ahead of his movie Benedetta premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, veteran filmmaker Paul Verhoeven did an interview with Variety.

One wild moment sexy scenes