Last week, Netflix dropped the first trailer for Blonde, a Marilyn Monroe biopic from director Andrew Dominik, based on Joyce Carol Oates’ highly fictionalized novel of the same name (Ana de Armas stars). The Netflix-produced film received an NC-17 rating, a fact that reportedly caused some consternation for Netflix management, which apparently expected a straightforward biopic from the artsy director who turned the story of Jesse James into a slow-paced, elegiac tone poem (but with Brad Pitt!).
It’s true that an NC-17 rating can make it difficult for a film to make money at the box office—given that major chains often won’t even carry them, seeing them as a like-for-like with the X rating it was introduced to replace. While that seems less of an issue in the streaming era, NC-17 still carries a stigma.
The thing is, NC-17 (and the X rating before it) was never intended to signal a movie was basically porn, but that it was thoroughly adult in content; classic examples include A Clockwork Orange, Midnight Cowboy, Nicholas Roeg’s Performance, and Lindsay Anderson’s if…, all of which were initially X-rated yet critically acclaimed (Midnight Cowboy even won the Best Picture Oscar). Unfortunately, eventually someone in the porn industry decided “X” was a good marketing hook, and it became common practice for pornos to self-rate (the meaningless “XXX: soon entered the lexicon), and the rating came to be associated with exclusively naughty films.
Eventually the MPAA introduced the NC-17 label as a way to reboot the system, with the 1990 Henry Miller/Anaïs Nin docudrama Henry & June being the first to get the new stamp. Thereafter followed a brief renaissance in adult-oriented films as, for a time, the NC-17 rating removed some of the stigma associated with films decidedly not meant for children, and even became an art-house badge of honor. Of course, an NC-17 in no way guarantees quality, but the following 17 films are deserving of both their critical reputations and their restrictive ratings. (Note: Some of these films pre-date the NC-17 rating, having initially been rated X, but they’ve all had their official rating updated since.)