Looking for the list itself? It's at the bottom of this entry.

Think you can't rent movies at Netflix that contain legitimately explicit sexuality? Think again, my frustrated friend! The fact is that over the last forty years, there have actually been dozens of mainstream films (and by "mainstream" I mean "any movie that actually played in a movie theatre") that have contained not just sexual situations but literal sex, the kind of graphic depictions of actual activities that sometimes brand such films as pornographic depending on who's doing the judging; and as I accidentally discovered recently after stumbling across a Wikipedia entry on the subject, a surprisingly high number of these films can be rented through mainstream video distributor Netflix, despite that company's longstanding rule against carrying traditional pornography.

I thought it would be interesting, then, to pick around 30 of these titles and watch them myself, then post reports here at the CCLaP website concerning not only how good the films themselves are, but also what exactly makes each of them explicit, and whether the sex portrayed in them is actually any fun to watch or not; after all, I'm sure this is a big question in the minds of many who have heard of these movies but never seen them, so if I'm in the position to perform this public service, it's my pleasure to do so. But of course, don't forget that many of these films were never meant to be erotic in the first place, and in fact I largely skipped those movies designed specifically to be showcases for softcore erotica (with some historical exceptions -- I included 1974's Emmanuelle, for example, specifically because it was one of the first mainstream softcore-erotica movies ever made, garnering millions in the process and kickstarting the entire softcore-erotica subgenre to begin with); as you'll see as this essay series continues, many of these more contemporary films actually use graphic sex to tell cautionary tales, or in some cases to even teach radical-feminist lessons about the dangers of pornography.

Anyway, the full list of the movies being reviewed for this series can be found below; if the title is hyperlinked, it means that its essay is now online. And just to give you one more warning, let me caution you that all these films are designed strictly for adults, and in fact those adults who can handle the most adult situations out there; unlike such notorious "hard R" films like Last Tango in Paris and Nine and a Half Weeks, the films below were specifically picked because they contain real scenes of real sex, things like actual fellatio and actual penetration that would be highly inappropriate for a certain amount of this website's readers. Caution is always advised when renting these movies yourself.

I Am Curious (1967)
Quiet Days in Clichy (1970)
Pink Flamingos (1972)
Emmanuelle (1974)
A Real Young Girl (1976)
Caligula (1979)
Spetters (1980)
Macumba Sexual (1981)
Rendez-vous (1985)
Singapore Sling (1990)
The Life of Jesus (1997)
Fiona (1998)
Humanite (1998)
Romance (1999)
Pola X (1999)
Baise-Moi (2000)
I Love You Too (2001)
Sex and Lucia (2001)
Intimacy (2001)
Ken Park (2002)
Irreversible (2002)
Porn Theatre (2002)
Secret Things (2002)
The Brown Bunny (2003)
Anatomy of Hell (2004)
9 Songs (2004)
Antares (2004)
The Wayward Cloud (2005)
Lie With Me (2005)
A Hole in My Heart (2005)
Red Road (2006)
Exterminating Angels (2006)
I Dreamt Under the Water (2008)
Antichrist (2009)