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Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in Emily Brönte's Wuthering Heights

However devoted I am to the 1939 Laurence Olivier-Merle Oberon version, this English corker (seen here last year on TNT) was raw, spellbinding stuff. Fiennes's Heathcliff is a fire-breathing psycho-hunk, Binoche's Cathy is a carefree little slip of a material girl, and they're radiant together, at least until their paths arc separated by fate and madness and all hell breaks loose. Any nagging unpleasant memories you have of Fiennes as the Nazi from Schindler's List or Binoche as the ruinous fiennes in Damage will finally dissipate in favor of the primal bonding going on here. Life on the moors is one long, lusty look in this movie--when Fiennes helps a reluctantly blue-blooded Binoche onto her horse for a ride, their secret smiles speak volumes about the hot, horsey sex in the hayloft they'd rather be having, right now.

Even later, after she's married to dweeb Edgar Linton and Heathcliff has come back to avenge his broken heart, you can still hear their engines revving. "Let us kiss goodbye as Cathy and Heathcliff of long ago," Binoche pleads, and when they do, with their eyes closed and their bodies shuddering, you think they might not make it out alive. When they break (if there had been a ref around, he would've had to pry them apart), Binoche looks like someone slipped her a mickey.

Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette in True Romance

I had sex in a phone booth once, though it wasn't on a Midwestern highway in broad daylight, as it is here. And she didn't look, or weigh, anything like Patricia Arquette, but that's OK, because I'm not Christian Slater, our dialogue wasn't written by Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Walken wasn't trying to kill me. In fact, I don't remember much about it at all. Certainly not whether or not she tasted "like a peach," as Slater says of Arquette, awestruck by his luck at having such a pert and vivacious young thing sitting on his pecker all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Playing low-class losers on the road with no prospects and a trunkload of trouble, Slater and Arquette rhyme in this movie like ketchup and fries. They don't care about condoms or pimps or hit men or anything at all except slopping it up like a pair of hillbillies. This is Tarantinoland, of course, so there are plenty of trials by buckshot, but you believe these two are wading through the gore and mayhem just to see each other on the other side.

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise

Not enough people saw this little beauty, in which Delpy and Hawke stoke each other's furnaces for an entire night's slow walk through Vienna. Perfect strangers, they helplessly link up and spend the rest of the movie trying to overcome whatever sense of courtesy and correctness it was that prevented them from having sex right there on the train. Their climactic sex scenario--on an Austrian lawn with a bottle of wine in the dead of night--is a lonely vacation wet dream, pure and simple. Again, the chemistry is mostly talk--from real, modest, uncertain people, not movie gods--but it's a perfect fit: I Fell in love with Delpy, my wife wanted to take Hawke home and leave me in the parking lot. What more could you ask?

Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns

"The thought of busting Batman makes me feel all... dirty," she says with a smirk. Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is a hell-bent, leather-bound supervixen just a few steps away from a total psychosexual meltdown. She's also a tramp and a half if you've got the stomach for it, and Michael Keaton's Batman, a dysfunctional weirdo in his own right, does. Take your pick between Catwoman/Batman scenes or Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne scenes (you can tell your therapist why. I don't want to hear it), because both crackle. Dancing at a costume ball where they are the only unmasked guests, Keaton and Pfeiffer are effortlessly simpatico--"No hard feelings, then," he says about an aborted date; "Actually, semi-hard, I'd say," she coos. Their kiss-- preceded by the mutual realization that they'd earlier kicked the crap out of each other dressed in leather, vinyl and hard rubber--is a desperate and crazy love-clutch from two hopeless, costumed alter egos.

Things get kinkier: few of us will ever forget Pfeiffer's impulsive licking of Keaton's face when she's got him pinned to a rooftop. The sounds of squeaking leather are enough to make you fish that Frederick's of Hollywood catalog out of the trash and reconsider those dog collars and studded panties. This movie is really all about the loneliness of succumbing to a fetish, and it's kinda sad: however perfect they are for each other, the two must go oft alone to await their separate sequels. Batman to his cave, and Catwoman, that working girl-turned-bughouse sex outlaw, to the snowy rooftops of Gotham.

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