Agent Provocateur

1st December 2005


Glad tidings for femme fatales: Agent Provocateur are sponsoring FilmFour's Dangerous Liaisons season, running throughout December from 10pm. Prepare for some seriously sexy cinema noir - the visual equivalent of having your nipple tweaked by a gangster.

Dangerous dates for December:..

Secretary
2002 (showing on 3rd, 15th, 27th)
James Spader's tight-arsed lawyer thinks he wants a good PA, but what this repressed sadist really needs is a sympathetic masochist. Then along comes Maggie Gyllenhaal, a self-harming typist who makes deliberate spelling mistakes so that Spader can chastise her. Whack! Romantic comedy has never been so twisted.

The Good Girl
2002 (showing on 8th, 17th, 30th)
A smouldering tale of lust and infidelity, Jennifer Aniston plays a disillusioned wife and small-town checkout girl who gets it on with gorgeous Jake Gyllenhaal. Aniston finally throws off the ghost of Rachel.

Basic Instinct
1992 (showing on 6th, 18th, 29th)
A rock star is murdered at the climax of a bondage session and bisexual, best-selling author Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone) is the main suspect. Michael Douglas is the cop who gets in too deep. Famous for the interrogation scene where Stone crosses and uncrosses her svelte legs and - oops! - the naughty minx has forgotten her panties!

Blue Velvet
1986 (showing on 1st, 14th, 25th)
David Lynch at his dirty, weird, kinky best. Clean-cut teenager Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a severed ear and before you can say, "Look behind you!", he's traced the carnage back to psychopathic gangster, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). And before you can say, "Don't look now!", he's in bed with Booth's pathologically masochistic mistress, Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini).

Scandal
1988 (showing on 12th, 24th)
Journey back to the 1960s and the days when MPs actually used to resign after a sex scandal. Government minister John Profumo (Ian McKellen) beds call-girl Christine Keeler (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer); sadly for him she's also shagging a Russian spy. Scandalous!

Bound
1996 (2nd, 13th, 26th)
Every schoolboy's wet dream: butch-but-sexy plumber Gina Gershon falls for ultra-femme mafia moll Jennifer Tilley. The lipstick lezzers conspire to swindle the gangsters and have plenty of easy-on-the-eye bedroom scenes en route.

Crash
1996 (showing 9th, 19th)
Jaded married couple, James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger, stumble across a group of sexual dangerous sports enthusiasts who get their jollies from car crashes, gaping wounds and callipers. As Time Out put it: "Chiefly a series of transgressive, obsessive, claustrophobic sex scenes." Need I say more?

2046
2004 (11th it is the UK TV Premiere, 22nd)
Tony Leung plays a writer whose liaisons with a series of absurdly beautiful women can never fill the gap left by an earlier passion. Wong Kar-Wai's ravishing film zig-zags through time and memory; love is the elusive beast that roams our past and future, but can never be caught and tamed in our present.

Birthday Girl
2001 (showing 11th, 21st)
Ben Chaplin plays a St Albans bank clerk who sends off for a mail-order Russian bride and ends up with Nicole Kidman (as if). She takes him to peaks of pleasure he didn't know existed and he can't believe his luck - until her menacing cousin and his mate turn up.

Wild Things
1998 (showing 10th, 23rd)
A glossy, steamy, entertaining thriller featuring Matt Dillon as a High School counsellor accused of rape. Denise Richards and Neve Campbell play the rich bitch and white trash slut who point the finger. Worth seeing for the scene where Campbell pours champagne over Richard's ample breasts and Dillon licks it off.

U-Turn
1997 (showing 16th, 28th)
Sean Penn plays a gambler who gets stranded in an Arizona backwater with little to recommend it except scheming, vamping, sultry Jennifer Lopez. Penn gets caught between Lopez and her husband (Nick Nolte) as both try and persuade him to bump off the other.

Miranda
2002 (showing 5th, 20th)
John Simm plays a librarian whose working days are suddenly electrified by Christina Ricci in a trench-coat. Ricci toys with him like a sleek, sexy panther, before ditching him abruptly for the real estate scam she's been plotting all along. November 2005