Expressions of affection and developing relationships are the bread and butter of entertainment. Meet Cute, opposites attracting, love and hate, the draw of people coming together. For me, The Terminator (1984) is the most perfectly captured love story. Strange circumstances yet the stakes are real and the emotions relatable. On top of that, their love scene is compelling and a standout. Anything hit you this way? The courtship? The payoff? All of it?
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The kiss between Hawkeye and Cora in The Last of the Mohicans is my favorite cinematic kiss. The violin score behind it marks it as both tragic and beautiful.
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Terminator gets bonus points for being perhaps the only time that a “man and woman in terrible danger take time out to have sex” scene is actually an important part of the plot.
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1000 percent. It needs to be there.
if anyone’s into podcasting, the current season of ‘you must remember this’ is doing this exact topic. first half of the season is erotic thrillers of the 80s.
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As noted in the riffing of Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell, “It [love] should be secret and shameful and leathery and dirty.”
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Pedantry not intended to criticize the OP:
I hate the term “making love” as a euphemism for sex; it is vague, stilted, prissy, silly, and not wholly accurate (Asimov had a similar point about “sexual intercourse”). Worse, the meaning has changed dramatically over the past century. I have a pamphlet titled How to Make Love from the 50s which gets to kissing, maybe to necking. William Shatner described one of the perks of Star Trek as getting to “make love to beautiful women.” He’s talking about making out onscreen with actresses. I can’t tell when “making love” became the entertainment industry’s go-to, but in the 1960s you get the abridged Shatner version, and by the 80s it means the full monty.
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Well, the guy who made the remake of Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife [La femme infid`ele] called Unfaithful has some rather good scenes of …love…making? With Diane Lane.
But there’s an awful lot of Richard Gere to get through, though.
So, it kind of cancels itself.
But, yes, while the “love” scenes themselves are somewhat gratuitous, the picture does raise the stakes. It’s essential to the movie’s theme of hapless accidental rage.
I think that’s an on-topic remark for this thread.
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“Full monty” ? Don’t you mean “Whole Enchilada” ? 
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That’s kinda a personal question… lol!
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Up next: the whole “gammy leg” debate. 
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In the interest of contributing productively to the original topic, I kinda felt that the sex scene in Top Gun was both necessary and ended up feeling pretty genuine (some apparently would say awkward). And since the romantic subplot was pretty important to the story.
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The Village is one of the few movies that I really geek out about the romance.
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Assuming we’re talking scenes about love, and not specifically love-scenes, here was a big ugly-cry that snuck into one of my favorite summer blockbuster comic movies:
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Agreed! It makes what happens to Lucuis all the more heart wrenching! But of course, plot line and stuff.
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An entire industry exists to…well, you guys probably don’t want to know anything about that.
As when Mary (Donna Reed) on the phone, says to her mother, “He’s making violent love to me, mother!” about her still reluctant but shortly to be won over future husband George (Jimmy Stewart) in It’s A Wonderful Life.
And short. Top Gun has been cited as the end of an era which started in…the '70s?..where every movie had to have an extended sex scene. In TG it’s short and sweet and back to the action.
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Karina Longworth also plans on following up the current season with one about the erotic thrillers of the '90s.
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