It was one of the biggest myths of parenting -- right up there with "we'll fit our new baby into our lifestyle." In exchange for forfeiting our right to ever be current on movies again, we would have all that stay-at-home time to catch up on videos after the kids were tucked in. But who has the time to rent a video, much less the stamina to watch one? Still, many of us, intent on keeping up appearances, continue to rent film after film instead of admitting that the only real reason to watch "The Postman Always Rings Twice" again is for the scene where Jack Nicholson grabs Jessica Lange, a frustrated and lustful housewife, throws her down on the flour-covered table where she's been making bread and kneads her creamy flesh before he devours her. For you lost souls, here's some help: Salon's guide to the most luscious, lip-biting, blanket-wringing celluloid moments.

Wings of Desire
BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG

It seems that these days everyone hates Wim Wenders, dismissing him as sentimental or banal, but for me his films sum up everything that I wish life was. The closing scene of "Wings of Desire" encapsulates the dream of love at first sight -- the fallen angel Damiel and the trapeze artist Marion approach each other in the ornate, smoky bar with smiles both bemused and rapturous. Bruno Ganz and Solveig Dommartin glow with gratitude for each other, but they also seem to have never doubted they'd meet. Nick Cave wails melodramatically onstage, but there are no histrionics in their encounter. Their expressions simply say, "It's you. Finally."

The Hunger
BY ANDREW LEONARD

Forget about the automatic eroticism guaranteed by vampiric lust. In "The Hunger," Susan Sarandon's luminescent eyes alone qualify every one of her on-screen scenes as a sensual feast. We already knew that Catharine Deneuve was a sex symbol of incomparable elegance. But for most of us, pre-"The Hunger," Sarandon signified little more than "Rocky Horror Picture Show" soft-core. Teenage boys longed for her, but it was mere adolescent fluff. The sight of Sarandon and Deneuve entangled with each other in a sprawl of sleek limbs and endless curves changed all that -- and helped propel Sarandon into a new orbit as intelligent adult icon, exerting irresistible magnetic force on men and women alike.

The Big Easy
BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS

Cinematic sex rarely resembles anything that ever occurs between actual human beings and their maddeningly fallible bodies. It's as if, blown up to wide-screen format, our corporeal shortcomings somehow diminish -- zippers never get stuck, joints never creak and everyone is always pantingly, wantonly hot to trot. So when Ellen Barkin's uptight district attorney blushingly wriggles away from Dennis Quaid's amorous embrace in "The Big Easy," it's a landmark film moment -- an endearingly authentic depiction of an embarrassing sexual system malfunction. "I'm no good at this," she wails, and everyone who's ever had a moment of romantic insecurity can relate. But what makes the scene truly classic is Quaid's response -- he's not discouraged or even surprised. Instead, the good old boy gallantly buries his head under her skirt and shows her the true meaning of Southern comfort. Despite the presence of two absurdly beautiful actors at the height of their allure, "The Big Easy" manages to capture the universally sweet, soul-stirring magic of a first night with a new love, when shyness yields at last to the thrill of discovery. And when you've seen every soft-focus billowy-curtains movie trick to make sex seem less like the awkward, wonderful mess it is, you begin to realize that what applies in real life goes on-screen as well -- a little foreplay, even the clumsy kind, goes a long, long way.

Dirty Dancing
BY MIGNON KHARGIE

This strutfest is my shameful nemesis, this tumescent choreograph of body-on-body vertical grind, in which I have exchanged places many times over with the female lead whose on-screen character development extended the pitiful length of her frizzy hair -- and all so I could do some physical collision of my own with one glorious bad-boy man-god. Not that Patrick Swayze's own thespian contribution ventured far beyond what seemed to be extensive exploration of the muscled silhouette, with much emphasis on that all-important sighting of the tanned and limber male body caught from behind -- but, God, what a body. My remote control and I have had sex with Patrick Swayze many times in the course of oft-repeated 90-minute-long sessions.

What, you wonder, causes this strange admixture of events to come violently together in this movie-length space? Why does one chord begin a chorus of discordant feeling, each note pulling another willingly or otherwise, leaving you shaking your head in wonder at the depth of your own stupidity but affected nonetheless, so you pick up the remote and play that damned scene over and over again until you fall back, staring into space, dissatisfied with all of your life through to this very point in time?

Most sensuous moment in film? Are there any? Or is it just the accumulation of our own life experiences that we bring to the movie moment, experiences that allow us to endure all those celluloid fingers parting moldy curtains in our labyrinthian psyches? And so we end up gooey-eyed, staring with longing at the screen, wishing with all our little hearts that perhaps if things had gone a little differently earlier in own lives, there but for so-and-such would have been me, with Him.

Out of Africa
BY LORI LEIBOVICH

Sure, I recall the extraordinary cinematography -- the sweeping vistas, lush savannas and rippling muscles of exotic animals -- but what is seared into my mind about "Out of Africa," an otherwise exhausting and overrated epic, is one lingering, decadent moment.

In that scene, Meryl Streep, who plays writer Karen Blixen, and Robert Redford, a British hunter and her illicit lover, bask in radiant sunshine on the lawn of Streep's expansive African homestead. Streep is seated as Redford stands her and slowly, lovingly shampoos her blond locks. Streep leans back, her eyes half shut, her mouth creased in a soft, submissive smile, and giggles -- surrendering to his touch and relishing in the simple pleasure of being bathed. She is unabashedly, beautifully, happy.

It's subtle sexy gestures like bathing that too often get lost on film (and in life) in favor of love scenes of the fucking-against-a-wall-in-the-rain variety. Just give me some water, some hands, a dramatic backdrop and two luminous blonds and I'm transported. And isn't that what the movies are about?

Truly, Madly, Deeply
BY JOYCE MILLMAN

When this small British film opened in the States in 1991, more than one reviewer called it "the thinking person's 'Ghost.'" To that, I would add "the feeling person's." Written and directed by Anthony Minghella before he hit it big with "The English Patient," "Truly, Madly, Deeply" is the story of a woman named Nina (Juliet Stevenson) who grieves so much for her dead lover, a cellist named Jamie who expired suddenly and freakishly, that he comes back to her, body and soul. And when I say she grieves for him, I don't mean delicate Demi Moore teardrops, I mean great rivers of art-house film agony. In the video stores, "Truly, Madly, Deeply" is classified as a romantic comedy because after Jamie comes back, Nina starts to remember all the things about him that used to annoy her when he was alive. But before that happens, there's the beautiful, spine-tingling, strangely romantic scene when he first appears to her. She's playing something dirge-y on the piano and her house is a sad mess that seems at once stuffed with memories and achingly empty. She starts to hear Jamie's cello in her head and they play together as if he'd never gone. Then she feels his presence -- he's standing behind her, gazing at her longingly. She rises, sobbing, and buries her face into his chest and there's something about his close-eyed, surrendering silence and the way he keeps hugging her and stroking her hair that just gets me every time.

Of course, the fact that Jamie is played by Alan Rickman, the sexiest semi-unknown actor around, might have something to do with it ...

The Piano
BY KATE MOSES

"There are things I'd like to do while you play," he tells her, and a deal is struck: Each time the willfully mute, disdainful Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) pays a visit to her piano, she'll win back a key from her illiterate, tattered, Maori-tattooed neighbor, George Baines (Harvey Keitel). Baines has shrewdly traded a soggy patch of his homestead to Ada's hapless husband (Sam Neill) for the piano, but it's not clear yet what Baines is up to. Is he simply a grubby lecher looking for a grope from the newly arrived Ada? Or has he caught something important, sensed some deep current running between himself and her?

The first clue appears in the scene of their first meeting, when Ada and her little daughter have weathered their first night in New Zealand under Ada's hoop skirt, surrounded by trunks, baskets of chickens, the crated piano and curlicued shells on the surf-pounded beach. Arriving with a motley crew of Maori Sherpas, Ada's new husband -- clearly expecting a helpmeet and aghast at his mail-order bride's tininess -- whispers to Baines, "How does she look to you?" "She looks ... tired," he responds, evenly but sympathetically.

But it's not until Ada has agreed to play for her piano's return that writer-director Jane Campion allows Baines to reveal the story's heart. Alone in his shack, Baines peeks through his filmy bed curtain and watches shadow- and dust-moted light filter across the barely uncrated piano, Ada's one beloved object -- something her husband understood so little that he was ready to leave it on the beach to weather away. Rising, Baines strips off his shirt and, now nude, wipes down the piano with his shirt. It's a small, arguably unthinking act, but from Baines, via Keitel, there is meaning to it, and the meaning is clear: It is tenderness and understanding and awe that move him. He knows her the way we all ache to be known.

Tampopo
BY DWIGHT GARNER

"First, observe the whole bowl. Appreciate its gestalt, savor its aromas." These words are intoned, in Juzo Itami's giddily intense 1987 movie "Tampopo," about a steaming bowl of noodle soup. We watch as an elderly gourmand tries to teach a young turk how to eat. This isn't in itself my most sensuous film moment, but it gives you a sense of the kind of movie "Tampopo" is -- a blissfully comic "noodle western" that invites you to dig deeply into all the things (food, sex, the quest for idiosyncratic knowledge) that matter. My most sensuous film moment turned out to be, upon rewatching "Tampopo" recently, a series of three or four scenes that I'd mentally blended into one. These moments, which are disconnected from "Tampopo's" main narrative -- the film is about a 40-something woman's quixotic quest to become an expert noodle chef -- feature a Japanese gangster (Koji Yakusho) and his sweetly daring girlfriend (Fukumi Kuroda). The gangster and his cutie-pie moll devote their lives to sensual pleasure, and Itami gives us a series of moments -- they're among the best and most hilarious sex scenes ever filmed -- in which these two fuck and feast at the same time. In one scene, they pass a raw egg yolk back and forth from their mouths; in another, he turns a bowl of tender live shrimp upside down on her belly and watches as she squirms around in delight. Itami's deftly comic hand with these scenes are the antidote to those garish food-as-porn scenes in films like "9 1/2 Weeks." Kicking back and watching "Tampopo," it's impossible not to appreciate its gestalt, savor its aromas. You may even want to go fuck and feast, yourself.

The English Patient
BY SUSANNA STROMBERG

"Swoon, I'll catch you," Ralph Feinnes whispers through a window to Kristin Scott Thomas as she stands in the hot sun of the glaring Iranian desert. Around her, people are celebrating in a makeshift attempt at a European Christmas. With the lowering of her eyelids, she agrees and shortly after they are tangled in the sweaty embrace of, as he writes on a scrap of paper, "Betrayal in Iran." As the Christmas party begins to sing "Silent Night," Kristin and Ralph find each other in a darkened hallway in the stickiest, sweetest demonstration of an illicit love affair ever seen on film. Unzipping the side of her white dress, Ralph slides his hand onto her bare skin and works some kind of a magic. Kristin's eyes roll back in her head as she takes his thumb in her mouth.

Later, as she sits in a crumpled but glorious heap, Kristin's husband dressed in a Santa Claus suit, finds her. "Darling," he says, "I heard the news that you fainted. Are you pregnant?"

"No, not pregnant," she sighs. He embraces her and nuzzles her head. Then suddenly, he smells something. Panic shows in Kristin's wide, watery-blue eyes as she thinks he's discovered the scent of Ralph on her. He sniffs again, then says, "marzipan. You smell of marzipan."