10 Best Erotic Thrillers Ever

The 1999 swansong of Stanley Kubrick has long been a divisive entry in the late filmmaker's body of work. Some felt the erotic thriller genre was beneath the revered auteur; some also felt that celebrity leads Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman weren't up to the task.

Still, while Eyes Wide Shut is certainly a strange and highly self-indulgent film, it has a powerful atmosphere to match the best of Kubrick's filmography, and makes for challenging yet compelling viewing.

For the most part it's essentially a seven-year-itch story, as Cruise's repressed Manhattan doctor is left deeply shaken by his wife (Kidman)'s confession of extra-marital desire, and heads out into the city in search of some illicit gratification of his own.

While the film deals first and foremost with erotic elements, it's debatable to what extent the thriller aspects really work, as Cruise's journey of sexual self-discovery ultimately lands him at a ritualistic orgy hosted by an elite secret society.

All this drags the film out to a patience-testing 159 minutes, a large portion of which is given over to pregnant pauses, and Cruise slowly repeating the last thing that anyone said to him. Still, there's no denying that the decadent masked ball sequence provides some startling and memorable imagery.