The Best Sex Movies of 2026 (So Far)

Just halfway into 2026, there are already several shining examples of truly provocative movies that center sex: Emerald Fennell’s immediately notorious re-rub of Wuthering Heights, Harry Lighton’s so-called dom-com Pillion, Elliot Tuttle’s taboo-flouting Blue Film, and, uh, yet another dom-com from Gregg Araki, I Want Your Sex. From pegging to consensual nonmonogamy to the joys of sex work to tentacles, this year is full of novel depictions and true breakthroughs in representation. If the back half can keep this pace, 2026 will end up a banner year for sex in cinema.

Gregg Araki’s sex comedy I Want Your Sex owes debt to sexploitation satirist Russ Meyer, animator Tex Avery, and pornography. It even winks at Araki’s own back catalog, particularly in its consciously over-the-top performances that are so stilted as to conflate the very concepts of good and bad acting.

I Want Your Sex is an endlessly amusing romp anchored by career-best performances from Olivia Wilde (as Erika Tracy, a fine artist who weaves her sex life into her provocative and more-than-a-little-ridiculous work) and Cooper Hoffman (as Elliot, Erika’s underling). The age gap (she’s 40; he’s 23) and dom/sub nature of their sexual relationship, which Erika effectively wills into existence, make I Want Your Sex something of a hetero-ish Pillion, though the sex here is way more explicit and voluminous. “You’re my sub,” Erika assigns Elliot. She dresses him in a leash and collar and a latex maid’s uniform and pegs him—the only enjoyable penetration that Elliot experiences in the movie is that which he’s on the receiving end of. He makes it through a rather mundane session with his actual girlfriend, Minerva (played by an especially droll Charli XCX), by fantasizing about Erika. Minerva ends up faking an orgasm.

Further adventures include Erika loaning out Elliot to a friend as a birthday present (“I’m your boy whore for the evening,” he explains) and a threesome with Elliot’s best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), that begins with Erika telling him, “Oh I’m fucking you tonight, but you have to find someone who will hold your ass open,” and ends in tears.

Nicole Bazuin’s adaptation of writer/performer/sex worker Andrea Werhun’s memoir of the same name is technically a documentary driven by Werhun’s own reflections on her career as an escort and stripper, as well as her conversations with people close to her (including her mother, partner, and fellow sex workers). But there’s a wealth of re-creations to go along with Werhun’s anecdotes and meditations, and many depict her in various sex acts. These re-creations range from straightforward (a tight, chest-up shot of her enjoying receiving oral sex on her back) to illustrative (a montage of her simulating riding guys while topless in front of various backgrounds to show the repetitive nature of her work) to absolutely outlandish (after a john asks for a rimjob, we get an anus-eye view of her puckering up and going in).

The tone is generally lighthearted (even when she’s discussing bacterial STIs she contracted during her career travels), but there are serious turns. There’s a discussion of her being raped while giving a lap dance and a recurring bit where, in male drag, Werhun plays a dude-ish manifestation of her own shame. She is reliably clear and well-spoken about her work. (She is, after all, a writer.) “Commuting in rush hour? To a job I hate? I would rather fuck a stranger,” she says, explaining her career choices. Sex-worker reviews on message boards constitute “a genre of erotica written by men for men,” and she compares herself to a comet when reflecting on her relationship to the bulk of her patrons: “You get to the core of a person and then you’re gone.”

Throughout Modern Whore, there is a motif of men attempting to tease out the trauma that they assume led her to her career path. That, in turn, imbues the film with an urgency. She explicitly underlines why it’s important for members of marginalized groups to tell their stories: so that these very misconceptions are avoided. Modern Whore is a great argument for showing and telling.

“Shall we have cross-species intercourse?” If that invitation sounds remotely appealing, well, Addison Heimann has written and directed the hentai-adjacent body-horror comedy for you. It concerns roommates Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and Craig (Jordan Gavaris), who, thanks to scatological reasons, need to move out of their shared home and stay in the country house of Joey’s former lover Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), who is a literal alien. There is no ambiguity, no big reveal. The guy is an alien who is so into “cross-species intercourse” that the movie is practically begging you to take a shot every time he drops the phrase. (You’d be hammered maybe halfway through.)

Heimann stretches his low budget to preposterous lengths, as sex with Brian involves being wrapped in tentacles (or maybe one big one). It snakes around Joey’s body, framing a breast, and at one point lifts her arched body in the air. (“I forgot how good it feels to have his tentacles on my skin,” she tells Craig later.) It probes Craig’s mouth (after he yells something in Japanese, an overt acknowledgement of the hentai at hand). At one point it appears that Brian and Laura (Marlene Forte) are sucking on a double-sided tentacle.

The sex scenes are staged in vivid hues: bisexual lighting for a bisexual alien antihero. The tentacle sex is unsurprisingly dangerous, as a Grindr hookup reveals (in a charmingly anachronistic flair, the text exchanges are displayed onscreen like silent-movie dialogue cards, with brief messages taking up the entire screen, bordered and in black and white). “I give people the best cross-species intercourse of their lifetime. It’s a gift,” claims Brian. It’s certainly something!

Elliot Tuttle’s Blue Film is, by most measures, a small movie. Its budget was something like $50,000, it concerns only two characters in a single location, and it follows one long conversation between them. But it packs a huge punch with an incendiary premise: A teacher named Hank (Reed Birney) hires his former student turned camboy Alex (Kieron Moore) to spend the night. Very early, it’s revealed that Frank served prison time for attempting to rape another of his former students, and he had a crush on the underage Alex. Hank notably identifies as not a pedophile but a pederast, but that’s a distinction that amounts to splitting hairs in the current cultural climate. Together, they mull both Alex’s fin-dom work and Hank’s attraction. Does it make him inherently evil? Is his perversion just a complicated manifestation of loneliness?

The centerpiece of Blue Film is a role-play scene that could test the will of even the most open-minded audience members. (Unsurprisingly, people reportedly walked out of screenings.) Hank shaves Alex’s body and then enacts a scene in which he molests Alex (“You can’t tell anybody I did this ’cause we could both get in a lot of trouble”), presumably living out the fantasy he had all those years ago when he was Alex’s teacher. After some oral on Hank that’s reciprocated, Alex snaps out of the illusion when Hank tells him, “I love you, Alex. So much.”

Though it takes place among consenting adults, what the scene represents is so reprehensible that it feels like Tuttle is pulling off the impossible. This is cutting-edge filmmaking, a way of manifesting a taboo, of realizing that which previously seemed to be impossible to make ethically. Blue Film is predicated on a conversation about attraction that is so reviled in our culture, simply speaking it is enough to leave a person wholly ostracized. That, naturally, prevents those who don’t want to abuse from seeking help—not that there’s a ton of help out there in the first place. The ability to discuss this sort of thing in public in terms beyond big, bold letters that spell “BAD” is a feat in and of itself. To be clear, titillation has nothing to do with why this scene is being included in this column. (It’s not something that most people will find hot, and Alex’s reaction is testament to that.) But it represents a clear headed and curious way of discussing something that often feels impossible to discuss in public and as such is something of a public service.

Debuting at Toronto International Film Festival in 2024 and then in Canadian theaters the following year, Sook-Yin Lee’s Paying for It finally landed in U.S. theaters in early 2026—and not a moment too soon. Here’s the film’s fascinating backstory: Cartoonist Chester Brown published a graphic memoir titled Paying for It in 2011 that tells the story of how opening his relationship with his girlfriend led to him frequenting sex workers. The girlfriend in question was none other than the director herself, who is renamed Sonny and portrayed in the film by Emily Lê. Though the film remains Brown’s story, we get to see it through the lens (literally!) of the actual woman with whom he was involved.

Paying for It is a wonderfully curious and compassionate portrayal of a relationship at a crossroads—a ’90s indie vibe (soft Araki/hard Wilt Stillman, perhaps) applied to ’20s problems. Sonny is put off by Chester’s foray into paid sex, as the movie openly ponders whether his involving money is fair within their agreement. Nonetheless, Chester (Dan Beirne) takes a tour of his local sex-worker offerings. The results are hilarious (“Oh great!” says his first after he prematurely ejaculates) and awkward (one complains about him stopping too much and wills herself to dissociate). Chester is … not particularly skilled by contemporary standards (very slow stroke, finishes rapidly, lacks passion), which may be a matter of fact or a jab from Lee. Possibly it’s both.

The sex workers he encounters are often descriptive in what they like and dislike about their jobs, both to Chester and to each other. He meets one, Denise, who deigns to kiss him on the mouth and receive oral from him. Their connection is real despite its transactional nature. Denise is played by Andrea Werhun, who wrote the 2018 memoir Modern Whore about her own time doing sex work. “I fuck for money and I enjoy it,” her character says without shame. Werhun plays the role impeccably.

Love it or hate it, Emerald Fennell’s visually hearty take on Wuthering Heights is all her own. (The poster refers to it as “Wuthering Heights,” scare quotes and all, to convey that this is a conscious take on Emily Brontë’s classic—not a canonical retelling.) One of Fennell’s most notable insertions is sex, particularly that between Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). We see Cathy’s sexual awakening—she watches people have sex through floorboards and masturbates soon after. And then, in the throes of her secret romance with Heathcliff, there’s a montage set to Charli XCX’s “Funny Mouth.”

Cathy and Heathcliff make out in the rain, then in a carriage, and she eventually rides him (in both contexts). He performs oral on her during a sun shower, and she sits on his lap outside among the wily, windy moors. They are almost entirely (and sumptuously!) clothed during these encounters. Later, they have more clothed sex on a table as they discuss Cathy’s husband, Edgar, whom she is cheating on with Heathcliff. “This is how you love him?” asks Heathcliff as he thrusts into her. Though brief—and, again, covered up—these scenes were enough to prompt The Economist to blare in a headline: “Sex, sex and more sex.” For the stodgy and easily scandalized, Fennell clearly hit a nerve.

This story originally appeared on Esquire.com.

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