Best Nude Movie Scenes

Best Nude Movie Scenes
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

3

Phoebe Cates in 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High'

6

Jason Segel in 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall'

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Why You Need Edging In Your Sex Life
15 Female Masturbation Tips Women Should Know
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
15 Sexy Movies You Won't Want to Miss
The 15 Most Jaw-Dropping Nude Moments on TV
The Best Kissing Games to Try Tonight
Hilaria Baldwin's Exercise for 'Better Sex'
Sex Moves That Are Guaranteed to Drive Him Crazy
The 15 Best Soft Porn Movies for Women
15 of the Best Movies With Male Nudity

We pick every product that we think you'll love the most. We may earn money from the links on this page.

These scenes go from hot to sexy to sizzling.
Some are funny (Jason Segal shaking his stuff in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) , some are romantic (Kate Winslet getting naked in Titanic ) and some are feel-the-tingle-down-to-your-toes sexy (Sharon Stone "forgetting" her panties in Basic Instinct ). Here's our official ranking of the hottest on-screen moments ever.
Name a nude scene more famous that Sharon Stone crossing and uncrossing her legs ( sans underwear) in Basic Instinct . Disturbingly, Stone was never told how, er, revealing, the scene was, but she says she supports the choice to keep it in the movie. "It's so right for the movie and so right for the character but if I would have gotten that [shot], even by accident, I would have had the courtesy to show it to my actor," she said .
Coming in at number two is Kate Winslet in Titanic , who uttered the iconic line, "draw me like one of your French girls," and then stripped naked for a casual portrait session with a man (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) she'd literally just met.
Also, fun fact: Legend has it that the actual drawing used in Titanic was made by the film's director, James Cameron, which....is vaguely weird, but um, let's move on.
Every 1980s teen likely remembers the iconic bikini scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High , when Phoebe Cates emerges from a swimming pool in slow motion and proceeds to unclip the front of her bikini top. The movie might be a little dated, but the moment is timeless.
The internet lost all semblance of chill when Ben Affleck's penis made an appearance in 2014's Gone Girl . Let's just say seeing this particular shower scene forever changed the way we see Ben.
Jennifer Garner joked about her then-husband's private parts becoming a viral sensation on The Ellen DeGeneres Show : "What I have to say is you're welcome. I try to consider myself a charitable person. You give me so much and I wanted to give something back to all of you."
This earns a spot in our ranking thanks to its sheer shock value. Mark Wahlberg wore a prosthetic to play professional porn star Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights , and the scene where he debuts it is um...memorable. As in, it's burned into our retinas.
Who can forget (hahaha) the scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall in which Jason Segel's character wanders out fully nude expecting sexy time, only to get immediately broken up with? This movie debuted a decade ago, and it's still one of the funniest and most memorable nude movie scenes in recent memory.
Speaking of full frontal male nudity, coming in hot at #7 is Kevin Bacon's big reveal in Wild Things —in which he does a terrible job wrapping a towel around his waist as he comes out of the shower. Hilariously, Bacon didn't expect people to be shocked by the scene, and was surprised when it was all anyone wanted to talk about.
"It wasn’t until we got to the press junket for the film that every single question, every single person asked me about it," he said in an interview. "By the way, when got to the European press, nobody asked me about it."
Probably the least sexy nude scene in history, this memorable moment involves Janet Leigh screaming bloody murder while being attacked in the shower by Norman Bates in Psycho . Even though it's terrifying — and doesn't show Leigh's breasts — it was mind-blowingly racy for its time.
Mena Suvari's fantasy nude scene in American Beauty also happens to be one of the most beautiful ones on this list — she's filmed lying on a bed of roses with petals covering her breasts. The moment has been recreated countless times in pop culture (including on Family Guy ), and definitely stands the test of time.
In Forrest Gump , Robin Wright is surprisingly provocative just chilling on a chair naked and holding a guitar while singing Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." Does it get more legendary? No. No it does not. (Actually, yes it does because she's only ranked #10, but shhhh .)

Nude scenes have appeared in feature-length narrative movies since the 1910s, and the best nude scenes deserve to be considered alongside the fine arts.
Get The Latest IndieWire Alerts And Newsletters Delivered Directly To Your Inbox

IndieWire is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2022 IndieWire Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress.com VIP

Our Brands

Variety

Deadline

Rolling Stone

WWD

HollywoodLife

Gold Derby

Spy

Robb Report

Footwear News

BGR

IndieWire

Sourcing Journal

TVLine

Fairchild Media

She Knows

©Fox Searchlight/Courtesy Everett Collection
“That’s not art. A striptease isn’t art. It’s too direct. It’s more direct than art.”
That line from Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” sums up a lot of feelings people seem to have about nudity in film as well. The history of painting and sculpture is full of nude portraiture, which is easily classified as art. But the nude scene in movies is rarely discussed alongside a Canova marble statue or Manet’s “Olympia.” Movies blur the boundaries between “real life” and artistic indirection so thoroughly that people discuss nude scenes in movies as practically everything but art. It’s “content” that deserves an “advisory.”
As many have noted, the very nature of their job demands that we look at actors. So when nudity enters the picture, it complicates the relationship between viewer and viewed. Are we invading their space? Are they invading ours? What should we feel about this? At times, it can be difficult not to write about onscreen nudity in anything but jokey terms.
Especially since nudity has become a fixture of comedy; punchlines are one of the few ways nudity is really used in mainstream entertainment today. It’s been a quarter-century from nudity being a central feature — and plot point — of what was then the most popular Hollywood film in decades: “ Titanic .” Bared skin in a similar manner in a top blockbuster in 2022 or any other recent year seems unthinkable.
But maybe we should take nudity seriously again. And a place to start is to look at the history of the nude scene since the silent era. The best nude scenes convey vulnerability, intimacy, eros, and so much more. Below is a timeline of the nude scene throughout cinema history. All are movies that wouldn’t have the same artistic impact without these moments.
Christian Blauvelt, Jude Dry, and Kate Erbland contributed to this story.
It may surprise today’s viewers just how liberated many silent films are in their depictions of sexuality. In the U.S., the self-censorship of the Hays Office wouldn’t come about until the late ‘20s (and wasn’t enforced at all until Joseph Breen took charge in 1934). Silent movies and early sound films have all manner of transgressive content. D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” features a full-on orgy with women wearing see-through fabrics or bathing in the nude. (Later on, during the Siege of Babylon, there’s a kiss between two men.) Some of that libertinism would pop up again in Griffith’s later “Orphans of the Storm,” and it would carry on through the early sound era with Claudette Colbert famously taking a nude bath (though only seen from the back) in asses’ milk in 1932’s “A Sign of the Cross.” But even a couple of decades earlier, Griffith was pushing boundaries in his own right. —CB
Peter Bogdanovich’s wistful black-and-white portrait of the end of an era for two high school seniors and longtime friends (Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms) remains best known as the hallmark of the director’s career. The film also launched the start of Cybill Shepherd’s career, when Bogdanovich’s then-wife Polly Platt thought Shepherd would be perfect for the role of Jacy Farrow, the smartest and prettiest girl in any room of the film’s declining northern Texas oil town.
But one scene got the film banned in part of the very state in which the film was set. After a Christmas dance, Jacy is invited to a skinny dipping party, uncomfortably undressing on the diving board as rowdy teens splash around below. Shepherd was 21 years old at the time of filming, but as her character is still in high school, this was met with ire from the public. “Last Picture Show” was actually deemed obscene by the city of Phoenix, requiring it to be judged by a federal court, which ultimately ruled the movie safe for viewing. Still, it was 1971, and so even the suggestion of nudity, let alone the full monty, managed to shock casual moviegoers. — RL
One of the most infamous sex scenes of the 1970s is a fugue of grief and hope. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie — neither overly eroticized with the lighting and staging here, and you would never confuse this for a porn film — seek solace in each other’s bodies after they’ve just had an epiphany about the death of their young daughter, who they’ve been mourning for months. It may be cinema’s greatest “sexual healing” scene, and the way director Nicolas Roeg intercuts their lovemaking with post-coital shots of them dressing and preparing to go out afterward somehow got it past censors in the U.S. and U.K. Salacious stories about Christie’s boyfriend Warren Beatty wanting control over the edit and rumors that the scene featured unsimulated sex dominated the narrative, but it’s really a deeply felt scene about two people finding hope in each other after the darkest time of their lives. —CB
Ah, nothing feels like summer more than pent-up hormones and a little red bikini. Judge Reinhold’s teen fantasy in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” includes an infamous topless moment featuring Phoebe Cates stripping off her teeny crimson two-piece. The 1982 classic film also stars Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Robert Romanus, and even a cameo by Nicolas Cage. Director Amy Heckerling made her feature debut with the dark comedy take on the pressures of adolescence; while Heckerling went on to helm the iconic (and nudity-free) “Clueless,” David Lynch reportedly was offered “Fast Times” first. And the film wasn’t Cates’ first time going “Fast.” She previously bared her breasts in “Paradise” when she was just 17. “The topless scene in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ was funny, which made it easy,” Cates said in 1982 . “In this business, if a girl wants a career, she has to be willing to strip. If you’ve got a good bod, then why not show it?” Cates also revealed in 2018 during an interview with former co-star Leigh that it was “not that big of a deal,” per Leigh’s advice. Not a big to her, but a big deal in the history of bikini drops. —SB
©Cinecom Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
It may be the ultimate in high-collared, petticoat-wearing, “tennis anyone?” escapism, the Merchant-Ivory classic that’s basically what every British period drama on “Masterpiece Theatre” has aspired to be ever since. “A Room with a View” is also the greatest of its kind because it’s so much more than those twee trappings. Case in point: When Julian Sands, Rupert Graves, and the immortal Simon Callow strip naked and frolic in a shallow Surrey pond. “Let’s have a bathe!” Grave asks his companions. The full-frontal escapade is an example for the ages of letting loose and communing with nature, and of British cinema’s greater willingness to feature male nudity than that of the U.S, ever since Ken Russell’s “Women in Love” was a male nudity milestone in 1969. —CB
This Article is related to: Film and tagged Boogie Nights , nude scenes , Shortbus , Titanic
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Listen to these IndieWire podcasts.
Interviews with leading film and TV creators about their process and craft.

All Titles TV Episodes Celebs Companies Keywords Advanced Search
Fully supported English (United States) Partially supported Français (Canada) Français (France) Deutsch (Deutschland) हिंदी (भारत) Italiano (Italia) Português (Brasil) Español (España) Español (México)

Copy from this list

Export

Report this list

Refine

See titles to watch instantly, titles you haven't rated, etc

Instant Watch Options

Genres

Movies or TV

IMDb Rating

In Theaters

Release Year

Keywords

Prime Video
(1)

Prime Video (Rent or Buy)
(30)

Drama
(53)

Romance
(25)

Thriller
(14)

Comedy
(10)

Crime
(6)

Horror
(6)

Biography
(5)

Mystery
(5)

Fantasy
(4)

Sci-Fi
(2)

War
(2)

Action
(1)

History
(1)

Short
(1)

Feature Film
(55)

TV Movie
(2)

Short Film
(1)

TV Mini-Series
(1)

TV Series
(1)

IMDb user rating (average)

1
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
1.8
1.9
2.0
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
2.8
2.9
3.0
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6
3.7
3.8
3.9
4.0
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
4.7
4.8
4.9
5.0
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.6
5.7
5.8
5.9
6.0
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7
6.8
6.9
7.0
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4
7.5
7.6
7.7
7.8
7.9
8.0
8.1
8.2
8.3
8.4
8.5
8.6
8.7
8.8
8.9
9.0
9.1
9.2
9.3
9.4
9.5
9.6
9.7
9.8
9.9
10

to

10
9.9
9.8
9.7
9.6
9.5
9.4
9.3
9.2
9.1
9.0
8.9
8.8
8.7
8.6
8.5
8.4
8.3
8.2
8.1
8.0
7.9
7.8
7.7
7.6
7.5
7.4
7.3
7.2
7.1
7.0
6.9
6.8
6.7
6.6
6.5
6.4
6.3
6.2
6.1
6.0

Adult Seduction Videos
Hollywood Full Movies 2022
Justine Jolie Nude

Best Nude Movie Scenes

Report Page