8. A Ma Soeur!/Fat Girl (2001)
Why it's controversial: Directed by French mistress of controversy Catherine Breillat, with this film, the controversy is going to leap out of the DVD box and smack you in the face as soon as you open it. Two young sisters are on holiday. The pretty one thinks it is better to lose your virginity to someone you love. The fat one thinks you should just go with anyone and get it over and done with. The pretty sister goes on to have a sexual liason (anal sex and then she is persuaded into vaginal sex) with a young lad and her sister cries bitter tears of jealousy. When their parents find out, the girls get driven home in anger by their mother only to meet a terrible fate. They pull in at a rest stop and an axeman just happens to be lurking. He kills the mother and the pretty sister and drags the fat sister out to the woods to have sex with her. When the police are on the scene, she denies being raped. There's your controversy right there. Despite, or maybe because, her non virginal mother and sister were killed, the fat sister is so twisted in the head that she lost her virginity that she denies being raped. She wanted to lose her virginity that much. What a sick freak!
Why it's good: Until the very end, the film is a realistic portrayal of how sisters interact. It is a fact of life that young girls do obsess about losing their virginity. The pretty girls are ok because they know they will have plenty of people who are willing to deflower them. However, it is much harder for unattractive girls. Some of them are scared they are going to die virgins. And it must particularly rankle between sisters - hence the fat sister's jealous tears when the pretty sister is doing it. This realism and the expectations we have of the film are blown to pieces in the final minutes with the axe murder. The pace changes completely from soap opera to horror film and the dissonance packs a real punch. It is, in my opinion, one of the great shock endings of all time in cinema.