The Sex Of The Angels (El Sexo De Los Angeles) (2012)

The Sex Of the Angels (aka Angels of Sex) (or, my alternative title, How Difficult It Is To Set Up And Maintain A Threesome) is a very dry look at how Bruno, happily committed to his girlfriend Carla, encounters and starts having sex with Rai, a dancer, but despite the actors' obvious commitment to the film's positive polyamorous message and the attempt to keep things titillating with butt shots and sex scenes, this thruple never feels even slightly like it would go the distance, and the film is ultimately only as exciting as a well-intentioned public service announcement. 

★★☆☆☆

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Basic Instinct (1992)

If you can get past the fact the sweaty suited detectives are all males indistinguishable from each other and the women are all deviants whose perverse sexual desires the men must sigh and resignedly sate, then this is for most of its runtime a solid thriller with Michael Douglas doing a good job playing Michael Douglas playing a detective, and Sharon Stone channelling Vertigo's Kim Novak to play the cop's prime murder suspect-with-benefits, a mystery novelist whose bed-partners end up dead by ice-pick.

★★★☆☆

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The People Upstairs (Spanish: "Sentimental")

With the exception of Javier Cámara's character, so sarcastic and annoying he almost bursts the whole, this comedy drama is a light and frothy bubble, a surprise given the subject matter could so easily have been treated as salacious, about a get-together between neighbouring couples with the couple from upstairs proving so disarmingly open, the downstairs couple are forced to face some truths.

★★★☆☆

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Stranger by the Lake (L'Inconnu Du Lac) (2013)

A plodding, unconvincing police investigation headed by the film world's most uncharismatic police inspector is the context for three or four explicit gay sex scenes and the film's one belaboured point about one gay man's destructive lust.

★★☆☆☆ 

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