10 Sexiest Movie Cheaters

There have been a few Jay Gatsbys in the movies, but none have captured the character’s boyish charm the way DiCaprio has in this Baz Luhrmann extravaganza. And if his obsessive poor-boy’s quest to be worthy of an upper-crust princess’s true love only proves that it is unattainable, Mulligan’s delicate, doe-eyed and dreamy portrayal of the adulterous Daisy Buchanan makes us want him to try anyway and, in the words of author F. Scott Fitzgerald, “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Tensions mount quickly when the stuffy British politician played by Irons descends into a lascivious affair with his son’s irresistibly dark and damaged fiancée (Binoche). If his status as a public figure wasn’t enough, the fact that he’s cuckolding his wife and his son makes for an absolute pressure cooker of a film that flips the Oedipal complex on its head—a twist that is tailor-made for director-provocateur Louis Malle.

When a happily married black architect from Harlem (Snipes, looking buffer than your average professional) falls for an adorable Italian co-worker from Brooklyn (Sciorra), ancient societal judgments about marriage and race begin to flare up all around them in this super-stylish Spike Lee Joint.

Tolstoy’s classic novel of adultery among aristocrats in rigidly feudal, 19th-century Russia has had a series of great onscreen portrayers, from Greta Garbo and Fredric March (1935) to Vivien Leigh and Kieron Moore (1948) to Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean (1997). But this passionate Joe Wright adaptation breathes new life into the story: Knightley’s Anna is simultaneously beautiful and sexy, refined and impetuous, in her liaisons with Taylor-Johnson’s seductively foppish Count Vronsky.

Mired in the purgatorial realm of bourgeois suburban parenthood, frustrated stay-at-homes Sarah (Winslet) and Brad (Wilson) become fast friends and, thanks to their off-the-charts chemistry, lusty cheaters who passionately repurpose a washing machine in the first of several encounters in Todd Field’s little domestic masterpiece of a film.

Cora (a bleached-blond Turner) might be the hottest paradox to ever grace the screen: she’s a murderer and a victim, a manipulator and a prisoner who, whether you love her or hate her, you (and hapless Garfield) can’t help but succumb to her allure. For a newer vintage of this blonde femme fatale, Jessica Lange’s 1981 turn as Cora—with Jack Nicholson as her mark—is worth a long hard look as well.

Adapting this disillusioned “diary of hate” by Graham Greene, Neil Jordan gives the sinning lovers—spiritual Sarah (Moore), married to a lifeless civil servant, and Maurice (Fiennes), her husband’s cynical yet fiery friend and confidante—a sizzling attraction, all against the background of a mercilessly bombed London during World War II.

We’ve all seen the iconic kiss on the beach awash with the foamy waves of the Pacific, but few today know that this sensual and passionate embrace between the beautiful Karen (Kerr) and brawny Warden (Lancaster)—her husband’s right-hand sergeant at Pearl Harbor in 1941—belies a darker story of love and war. In it, their forbidden fling is as ephemeral as the tide around them.

Though Mrs. Robinson—a splendid Bancroft as the original cougar—ensnares an adrift young Ben (Hoffman) with her long, nylon-clad legs and then loses the battle for his heart to her daughter, she wins the war for ours as the celebrated villain of Simon & Garfunkel’s song and Mike Nichols’s suave “Generation Gap” satire. Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson!

In this epic romance that sweeps through space and time, the dashing Count Laszlo de Almásy (Fiennes) falls for the effortlessly elegant Katharine Clifton (Scott Thomas) and engages in an impossibly intense Saharan affair on the eve of World War II. It’s a fragile love relationship that, while tragically doomed to agony and death, leaves forgiveness and life in its wake.