Spring is here, and we have so many sexually explicit movies on HBO Max to help us celebrate. Though the days of watching Real Sex and Cathouse: The Series on HBO are long gone, an HBO Max subscription is going to give you access to some of the raciest and steamiest movies out there.
If you’re in the mood for some of the most sexually explicit movies on HBO Max, you’ve come to the right place. From splashy, star-studded dramas to steamy erotic thrillers to some truly depraved additions to cinema, and so much more, there’s plenty to choose from.
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
The Director: Luca Guadagnino
Article continues belowThe Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg
Based On: Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
What It’s About: A young man falls madly in love with his father’s research assistant over the course of a summer spent together in Northern Italy.
What To Expect: An emotionally stirring and visually stunning exploration of love, loss, and identity, Call Me by Your Name is a charming albeit bittersweet tale of romance. It’s exciting, endearing, and rather explicit at times.
Onibaba (1964)
The Director: Kaneto Shindō
The Cast: Nobuko Otowa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Kei Satō
What It’s About: After learning her husband was killed in a mid-14th-century war in Japan, a woman falls for a young and handsome soldier. That is, until her angry and jealous mother-in-law gets in the way.
What To Expect: As is the case with a great number of classic samurai films, Onibaba is a dark, mysterious, and incredibly violent saga. However, with an intense romance at its core, it’s also quite explicit in its sexuality.
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)
The Director: Judd Apatow
The Cast: Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd
What It’s About: A nerdy loner working in an electronics store starts the journey of a lifetime after his rude and crude coworkers discover he’s never been with a woman.
What To Expect: With nonstop jokes, more than enough awkward and cringey moments to go around, and some outrageously sexual encounters, there’s a lot going on in this 2005 comedy that turned Steve Carell into a superstar.
The Terminator (1984)
The Director: James Cameron
The Cast: Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn
What It’s About: A young woman living in Los Angeles finds her life turned upside down upon learning she’s the key to humanity’s survival, but only if a cyborg sent from the future doesn’t kill her first.
What To Expect: Not only is James Cameron’s The Terminator one of the best sci-fi movies of all time, it’s also sexy as hell, and it’s not just because of a naked cyborg running around.
Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019)
The Director: Céline Sciamma
The Cast: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami
What It’s About: An artist in 18th-century France is hired to paint a portrait of a wealthy aristocrat, only for the two women to start up a steamy and forbidden romance.
What To Expect: Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a passionate, intense, and unforgettable tale of hidden romance and subdued passions.
Heated Rivalry (2025)
The Director/Executive Producer: Jacob Tiernery
The Cast: Hudson Williams, Connor Storrie, Francois Arnaud,
Based On: The Game Changers book series by Rachel Reid
What It’s About: Two young hockey players keep their hot-and-heavy off-the-ice romance a secret from everyone around them as they try to succeed in the sport in this TV show that’s a book-to-screen adaptation of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers romance series.
What To Expect: Including this is cheating a bit, because it’s a series, but if you haven’t heard by now, Heated Rivalry is full of intense action (on the ice and between the sheets). But, that’s not all, as the show’s six-part first season poses a number of challenges for these young lovers.
The Shape Of Water (2017)
The Director: Guillermo del Toro
The Cast: Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones, Michael Shannon
What It’s About: A cleaning lady at a top-secret research facility has a chance encounter with a mysterious amphibian man, with whom she starts an unlikely yet highly impactful bond.
What To Expect: If you’ve ever wanted to see a Best Picture winner in which a woman and a sea monster get down to business, The Shape of Water is going to do the trick.
Zola (2020)
The Director: Janicza Bravo
The Cast: Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Colman Domingo
Based On: “Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted” by David Kushner
What It’s About: A down-on-her-luck exotic dancer reluctantly agrees to go with a new friend on a road trip to Florida, only for the experience to get outrageously out of hand.
What To Expect: Keep in mind, pretty much everything that happens in this movie is based on reality. The way Janciza Bravo brings a series of tweets to life is incredible and triumphant, albeit a bit unsettling at times.
Shoot The Piano Player (1960)
The Director: Francois Truffaut
The Cast: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger
Based On: Down There by David Goodis
What It’s About: Following a series of tragic events, a pianist thinks he’s gotten a new lease on life only to discover that he’s in a world of trouble.
What To Expect: You have chaotic music scenes, sex, gangsters looking for some stolen loot, and so many complicated characters.
One Battle After Another (2025)
The Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
The Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Sean Penn
Based On: Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
What It’s About: Years after starting over, a washed-up former revolutionary is thrust back into a life of chaos when he learns that an old enemy is trying to capture and kill his teenage daughter.
What To Expect: Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic action-thriller is funny, dramatic, and sexy as all hell from start to finish.
Moonlight (2016)
The Director: Barry Jenkins
The Cast: Trevante Rhodes, Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris
What It’s About: Told over the course of three decades, a young man attempts to come to terms with the world around him and his own sexuality.
What To Expect: Famously part of the 2017 Oscars mishap where the wrong Best Picture winner was announced, Moonlight is an emotional, thought-provoking, and triumphant exploration of sexuality, identity, and humanity.
Ex Machina (2015)
The Director: Alex Garland
The Cast: Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson
What It’s About: A web developer gets the opportunity of a lifetime when he is invited to spend a weekend at his CEO’s remote estate and administer a Turing test to his latest creation, a hyper-intelligent robot.
What To Expect: Ex Machina is one of the unique, unsettling, and exhilarating sci-fi movies that’ve come out in the 21st century. With a mystery that becomes more entrancing as it unfolds, dynamic performances by its cast, and some oddly sexy moments, there’s a lot to unpack.
The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
The Director: Rob Zombie
The Cast: Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie
What It’s About: On the run from a vengeful sheriff and his large posse, a family of sadistic killers goes on the run. Keeping a low profile isn’t in the cards, as this murderous bunch continues killing folks in sickening ways at every turn.
What To Expect: Much like A House of 1,000 Corpses, this 2005 sequel is full of violence, cussing, and more nudity than we know what to do with.
Atomic Blonde (2017)
The Director: David Leitch
The Cast: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman
Based On: The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart
What It’s About: Just as the Berlin Wall is about to fall, a spy is sent on a mission to retrieve a list of covert agents before it’s too late.
What To Expect: One of the best action movies of the past decade, Atomic Blonde is full of big set pieces, twists, turns, more shootouts, and a whole lot of sex appeal.
Girls Trip (2017)
The Director: Malcolm D. Lee
The Cast: Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Tiffany Haddish
What It’s About: Years after their once-tight friendship began to fall apart, four women travel to New Orleans to attend a music festival where anything and everything can happen.
What To Expect: An over-the-top comedy set in the “Big Easy,” this one was bound to be off the rails. Girls Trip doesn’t hold back in any capacity, making it one of the wildest comedies in some time.
Wedding Crashers (2005)
The Director: David Dobkin
The Cast: Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Bradley Cooper
What It’s About: Two bachelors specializing in crashing weddings find themselves in quite a situation after one of them falls in love with the daughter of a high-ranking government official.
What To Expect: Released at the height of the “Frat Pack” era of Hollywood, Wedding Crashers is a rude, crude, and utterly hilarious comedy about two serial bachelors who push things too far.
The Substance (2024)
The Director: Coralie Fargeat
The Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
What It’s About: After being fired from her aerobics show (by her disgusting monster of a boss), an aging actress turns to a revolutionary service to be younger, fitter, and more appealing to the masses.
What To Expect: Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, one of the angriest movies in years, is not only a great body horror story, but it’s also a biting critique of modern society.
Multiple Maniacs (1970)
The Director: John Waters
The Cast: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Pearce
What It’s About: A traveling freak show known as The Cavalcade of Perversion travels from town to town robbing and later killing its patrons before things really get out of hand. We mean severely out of hand.
What To Expect: Those familiar with John Waters’ body of work know what they’re getting into here. However, those decent folks out there should note that Multiple Maniacs is a sick and depraved comedy that really has to be seen to be believed.
Sinners (2025)
The Director: Ryan Coogler
The Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell
What It’s About: Returning home from Chicago, a pair of twins opens a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta, only to have their opening night crashed by a vicious vampire and his followers.
What To Expect: Easily one of the best horror movies of 2025, Sinners is an achievement in filmmaking. That said, it’s not without some highly sexualized moments.
Fallen Angels (1995)
The Director: Wong Kar-wai
The Cast: Leon Lai, Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro
What It’s About: Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels contains two intertwined storylines: one follows a reluctant hitman wishing to leave his life of crime behind as he gets caught between two lovers, and a second about a man on the run from police in Hong Kong.
What To Expect: Featuring exquisite cinematography, a gripping narrative filled with complex characters and devastating decisions, and some steamy romance, this is one enchanting exploration of crime and passion.
Stream Fallen Angels on HBO Max.
Parthenope (2025)
The Director: Paolo Sorrentino
The Cast: Celeste Dalla Porta, Stefania Sandrelli, Gary Oldman
What It’s About: Told through a series of vignettes, Parthenope tells the story of an Italian woman whose hunger for knowledge, experiences, and life in general takes her to wild and unimaginable places.
What To Expect: Centering on a beautiful and charismatic woman (played by Celeste Dalla Porta), Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope is an exploration of love, loss, lust, and self-discovery.
The Brutalist (2024)
The Director: Brady Corbet
The Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce
What It’s About: A holocaust survivor and world-renowned architect immigrates to the United States after World War II in search of the American Dream, kicking off an ambitious, decades-long project in the process.
What To Expect: The agony and ecstasy of art, the deconstruction of the American Dream, and some intense sex scenes (including a very graphic one in the opening minutes) are found throughout this three-hour drama.
Babygirl (2024)
The Director: Halina Reijn
The Cast: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Sophie Wilde
What It’s About: A successful CEO (played by Nicole Kidman) finds her life at the office and at her home becoming increasingly more complicated after starting an affair with a much younger intern (played by Harris Dickinson).
What To Expect: With its fair share of sexually explicit moments throughout and electric chemistry between the leads, this risque drama is worth watching.
Queer (2024)
The Director: Luca Guadagnino
The Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman
Based On: William S. Burroughs’ Queer
What It’s About: An American expatriate (played by Daniel Craig) spends his days wasting away in the sun and his nights looking for young lovers in Mexico City until he meets and falls for a young American GI (played by Drew Starkey).
What To Expect: Considering this is a Luca Guadagnino movie based on a William S. Burroughs novella, it takes no stretch of the imagination to see Queer as an intense, unrelenting, and unforgettable tale of love, loss, and lust.
We Live In Time (2024)
The Director: John Crowley
The Cast: Florence Pugh, Andrew Garfield
What It’s About: Presented in a non-linear narrative format, John Crowley’s We Live in Time tells the story of a young couple as they meet, fall in love, have a kid, and then come to terms with a serious illness that could upend everything they’ve built.
What To Expect: Though a movie about illness and loss, We Live in Time is very much a story of romance and passion.
Belle De Jour (1967)
The Director: Luis Buñuel
The Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Pierre Clementi
What It’s About: Growing bored with life at home, the wife of a wealthy doctor decides to take a new path in life by spending her afternoons as a call girl at a Paris brothel.
What To Expect: Combining elements of surrealist erotica and psychological drama, Belle de Jour is a cool and moody French film that explores everything from existential crises to sexual awakenings and finding meaning in a mad world.
Demonlover (2002)
The Director: Olivier Assayas
The Cast: Connie Nielsen, Chloe Sevigny, Gina Gershon
What It’s About: An ambitious and cutthroat media executive goes to great lengths to acquire a Japanese animation house to give her company the upper hand.
What To Expect: Probably one of the most notorious examples of the New French Extremity movement, Demonlover combines elements of erotic thrillers with corporate espionage.
Working Girls (1986)
The Director: Lizzie Borden
The Cast: Louise Smith, Amanda Goodwin, Marusia Zach
What It’s About: A day in the lives of a group of sex workers and their clients are explored as they come in and out of a New York City brothel.
What To Expect: The movie is full of nudity, sex scenes, and all kinds of risque behavior that push the envelope and the boundaries as to what’s acceptable on the big screen.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down (1990)
The Director: Pedro Almodóvar
The Cast: Antonio Banderas, Victoria Abril, Loles León
What It’s About: A recently released psychiatric patient tries to find a former adult film star and convince her to fall in love with him, though how he goes about this is far from romantic.
What To Expect: One of Antonio Banderas’ best movies, Tie Me Up!, Tie Me Down! leaves little to the imagination.
Gia (1998)
The Director: Michael Cristofer
The Cast: Angelina Jolie, Elizabeth Mitchell, Faye Dunaway
What It’s About: The life and times of supermodel Gia Carangi (Jolie) are explored in great detail, as are her various romantic relationships.
What To Expect: The biographical drama doesn’t hold back when it comes to the depictions of the model’s personal struggles, and can be too much for some viewers. Nothing is left on the table…
Behind The Candelabra (2013)
The Director: Steven Soderbergh
The Cast: Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Rob Lowe
What It’s About: An exploration of legendary Las Vegas pianist Liberace and his intense relationship with a lover in the final years of his life.
What To Expect: The 2013 HBO original movie doesn’t hold back on the excess that fueled Liberace’s life off-stage, as well as his attempts to preserve his public image. That said, it has more than a few explicit sex scenes.
The HBO Max library is changing all the time, meaning you may want to check back at a later date for even more steamy and romantic dramas, comedies, and thrillers.
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