A widower (Brando) and a young Parisian woman (Schneider) engage in an anonymous sexual relationship that can’t honestly be called ‘casual’, and soon goes beyond gratification into realms of dominance and obsession. Wong won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for this romantic whirlwind, starring Leung and Cheung as two Hong Kong expats living in Buenos Aires.

Pichul’s nihilistic drama, an enduring emblem of the Soviet Union during perestroika, follows a wild Russian girl as she falls in love with a man whom her family violently disapproves of. Oshima’s 1976 masterpiece – the crown jewel of a career hell-bent on upsetting the establishment – recounts the true story of the all-consuming sexual obsession that blossomed between a hotel owner and his new employee in 1936 Tokyo. Danish provocateur Von Trier explores the increasingly troubled sex life of self-confessed sex addict Joe, played by two different actors at different ages. Von Trier’s epic was so long, he split it into two volumes. After some smoldering chemistry and a spot of light plumbing, Corky (Gershon) and Violet (Tilly) fall hard for each other – at least, as hard it’s possible to in a movie where no one seems entirely trustworthy. Before long, they’re naked on Corky’s mattress, out of sight of Violet’s mobster boyfriend Caesar (Joe Pantoliano). The worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival’ according to Roger Ebert (before Gallo trimmed 26 minutes from his original cut, prompting Ebert to reconsider), this meditative art-house drama follows a motorcycle racer’s cross-country journey as he’s haunted by the memory of his ex-girlfriend.We are living in puritanical times. If you’ve followed the ongoing debate over sex scenes that’s carried out on social media over the last few years – and if you haven’t, well, congratulations – then you’ll know the one thing that unites progressive-minded zoomers and pearl-clutching conservatives is an aversion to cinematic boning. The argument goes that sex scenes rarely add anything to the plot of a movie, nor develop characters, and exist simply to gratify the perv in the director’s chair and make the prudes in the audience squirm in their chairs. It’s a flawed viewpoint, but in fairness, given Hollywood’s general shift away from showing sexuality on screen, it’s entirely possible that younger folks have simply never seen a good sex scene.

The second official effort of the Dogme 95 movement, Von Trier’s impish provocation tells the story of a woman named Karen who, eager to escape from her life, falls in with a group of able-bodied adults who pretend to be mentally handicapped in public. Godard’s DIY 3-D experiment abstractly dissects the relationships between two separate couples in its effort to dismantle the conventions of stereoscopic filmmaking. Finally, someone in the MCU has sex. Two people, in fact. The remarkably well-preserved centuries-old couple Sersi and Ikaris enjoy a PG tumble in a break from baddy-fighting. Having spent their beach trip scrambling the boys’ image of themselves and their sexuality, Verdú initiates a threesome where, in their orgiastic delirium, Luna and Bernal share a sudden, passionate kiss. As it seems like their scheme is unravelling, the three principles reconcile in a motel pool, sans clothes, in a scene studiously examined by teenage boys in dark family rooms with their fingers hovering over their TV remote’s power button.From the latter cut, naturally, comes the famous lesbian scene, starring PenthousePets Anneka di Lorenzo and Lori Wagner, who engage in a three-minute romp with zero relevance to the plot. The local nuns, convinced that they have been possessed by the devil, are having their demons exorcised by a witch hunter. But when their psychosomatic condition remains unresolved, they promptly descend into an orgiastic fever, some of them using a giant crucifix as a dildo, commencing a sequence that has since become known as the Rape of Christ. In the ultimate show of commitment to their characters, the Idiots retreat to their house in the suburbs of Denmark and launch into a haphazard orgy, all while still pretending to be handicapped (they refer to the performance as ‘spazzing’). Karen isn’t explicitly involved in the action, but the rest of her newfound pals are a jumble of naked bodies on the living-room floor, erect penises poking out in all directions as the men and women groan and shake with fake palsies. Eternals, Marvel’s sprawling, cod-philosophical saga of godlike beings protecting Earth from alien beasties.