The Best Movie Sex Scenes Streaming on HBO Max in 2025

First, it was HBO Max. Then, it was simply “Max.” (Drop the “HBO.” It’s cleaner.) But now, once again, the Warner Bros.-owned streaming service will go by “HBO Max.” Make up your mind, Zaslav!

But no matter the name, one thing you can always count on the HBO streaming service not to change is its wide selection of movie sex scenes. If it doesn’t have sex and nudity, it’s not HBO!

Look, we get it, and we don’t judge. We all need to blow off some steam at the end of a long, hard week. Back in the day, you had to lurk in the “adult content” section of a video store, but thanks to the advent of streaming services, you can now do your lurking in the privacy of your own home. And there’s no better streaming service to peruse for sexy content than HBO Max.

The movie sex scenes on HBO Max include recent hits like Sinners, beloved indie horror flicks like Pearl, and NC-17 art house staples like Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Scroll down to peruse Decider’s list of the best movie sex scenes streaming on HBO Max in July 2025. And if that’s still not enough for you, check out this list of the best summer sex comedies, the hottest movie sex scenes of 2025, and more that Decider After Dark has to offer.

1. Ryan Coogler did not shy away from sex in Sinners, and we’re grateful. There’s no doubt that Hailee Steinfeld is very beautiful, but the hottest sex scene in Sinners—and, indeed, perhaps the hottest sex scene of the year so far—is the raw, tender moment of passion between Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) and his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku). First, Annie hits Smoke with some very sensual ear nibbles. The face that Jordan makes when she does is, well, let’s just call it memorable. Then he flips her around and takes her from behind. Despite the lack of nudity, it’s incredibly hot.

3. All three movies in Ti West’s horror trilogy starring Mia Goth as a porn star are currently streaming on Max, and all three contain some pretty steamy scenes. But to me, the stand-out sex scene of the franchise is the one in Pearl, the 2022 prequel film to X. Taking place in 1918, during the Spanish Flu pandemic and World War I, Pearl (also played by Goth) is stuck on an isolated farm with her husband away at war. After her repressed sex drive is awakened by a charming movie projectionist (David Corenswet), she takes out her sexual frustrations on a scarecrow, by dry-humping that straw-man to completion. Talk abut a roll in the hay!

4. What I like about the sex scenes in Queer—Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical 1985 novella—is that Guadagnino pans the camera away as if to give the lovers privacy… and then pans right back again to capture all the sordid details. And yes, you see a lot. Daniel Craig stars as William Lee, an American writer living in Mexico City in the 1950s, who spends his days chasing men and doing opioids. He pursues a young American man, Eugene Allerton (played by Drew Starkey), and the two fall into a passionate but troubled romantic entanglement, further complicated by Lee’s drug addiction. But what they have is real and tender, and sex is an integral part.

5. The reason that the sex scene in Portrait of a Lady of Fire—the French lesbian romance that took the queer community by storm in 2019—is so hot is because the romance is so hot. When these lovers played by Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant finally do the deed, you’re swooning because the build-up was just that good. And leave it writer/director Céline Sciamma to include the best visual gag of recent years: A close-up of a hand sliding in and out of an armpit, which looks a lot like, well, you know.

6. Who knew Nicole Kidman writhing on a dirty hotel room carpet could be so hot? Writer/director Halina Reijn keeps the camera on Kidman’s face, as her character, a high performing CEO, gets fingered by a young intern (Harris Dickinson). There’s no nudity, no thrusting, and no clever camera pans. It’s just an incredible performance from Kidman. When she finishes, it’s a complete 180 from the performative, fake orgasm Kidman puts on for her on-screen husband in the film’s opening scene. It’s raw, animalistic, and honestly, a little gross. It’s real. 

7. It’s hard to pick just one sex scene from Pedro Almodóvar’s dark romantic comedy from the ’80s, which borders on soft core porn and is partially responsible for the creation of the NC-17 rating in the U.S. This is a movie that is sexy and explicit, but, like, in an artistic way. It’s not porn if it’s art! Antonio Banderas stars as a former psychiatric patient who is released from a mental ward and promptly kidnaps his favorite actress/porn star (played by Victoria Abril). Maybe the doctors should have reviewed those release papers one more time.

8. There’s nothing hotter than repressed desired, and Rachel McAdams is as repressed as they come in Disobedience. This 2018 romantic drama stars Rachel Weisz as a woman named Ronit who returns to the strict Orthodox Jewish community of her childhood to bury her father. There, she reunites with her childhood friends Esti (McAdams) and Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), who are now married. Ronit is pretty surprised to learn this, given that she was kicked out of the community for being caught in a romantic entanglement with Esti. Once reunited, the two women can’t keep their hands off each other. According to Decider’s Meghan O’Keefe, Weisz and McAdams share an “insanely dirty sex scene” involving Weisz repeatedly spitting into McAdams’s mouth. Hot!

9. Say what you will about Mickey 17, aka Bong Joon-ho’s bizarre follow-up to his Best Picture winner, Parasite. But no one can deny that Mickey 17 was brave enough to do what few clone movies have had the guts for: Clone threesome sex! Robert Pattinson as an “expendable” clone named Mickey, who accidentally doesn’t die when he’s supposed to, resulting—spoiler alert—two Robert Pattinsons. Mickey’s girlfriend, played by the hilarious Naomi Ackie, doesn’t see this as a problem. The three of them don’t quite go all the way, but some fun, sexy times are had by all.

10. Sure, there are plenty of Zoe Kravitz sex scenes in her too-short Hulu series High Fidelity, but if you want to see a blue-haired Zoe Kravitz sex scene, I highly recommend Steven Soderbergh’s underrated pandemic thriller, KIMI, streaming on Max. The sex scene is brief, but it’s also just a really good movie—a smart, exhilarating, and modern take on Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller, Rear Window.

11. The sex between Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian in Love Lies Bleeding is, to blunt, hot AF. Set in 1989, Stewart stars as a gym manager, and O’Brien stars as a body builder who trains at her gym. The sparks between them are immediate, and the sexual tension boils over after O’Brien’s character asks Stewart to give her a steroid injection… right in the butt. A passionate make-out session at the gym leads to a hot-and-heavy sex scene, in which Stewart enthusiastically eats O’Brien out. Just don’t be like that drunk guy in Detroit who masturbated to the film in the movie theater. 

12. Who else remembers this star-studded romantic comedy from 2009? Anyone? Bueller? Well, if you do remember it, then perhaps you’ll recall that Bradley Cooper and Scarlett Johansson have a steamy love scene when their characters have an affair in an office setting. It involves Scarlett Johansson in red lingerie successfully seducing Bradley Cooper… just moments before his wife walks in. Oops!