French drama.
Shana copes with the daily routine, thanks to the support of her tight-knit group of girlfriends. When her grandmother died, Shana inherited a ring that was supposed to ward off the evil eye.
Eva Huault topless in Shana (2026)
Florence Pugh topless in episodes 3 and 4 of East of Eden
Captures from episode 3:
Capture from episode 4:
Florence Pugh topless in episode 2 of East of Eden
New on Netflix today in seven parts, this American mini-series is the latest interpretation of the noted Steinbeck novel.
Steinbeck originally addressed the novel to his young sons, Thom and John (then 6 1⁄2 and 4 1⁄2 years old, respectively). Steinbeck wanted to describe the sights, sounds, smells, and colors of the Salinas Valley for them in detail.
Given that The Salinas Valley is such a powerful presence in the book, I doubt that Steinbeck would approve of filming the story anywhere else, but this series was filmed in New Zealand!
There is additional nudity in later episodes as well. More from this series.
I don’t think I have ever read any of Steinbeck’s books voluntarily, but as a baby boomer who went to a prep school and then majored in literature, I found him inevitable. I must have read a shitload of his books for classes: Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, The Grapes of Wrath, Travels With Charlie, etc. I have not read East of Eden because it was never required, and because I am no fan of magna opera. To be candid, I have never even made it all the way through the James Dean film, although I have probably watched the entire film if one adds together all the snippets in all the years.
I never found him much better than competent as a wordsmith. He was not a graceful stylist like Thomas Wolfe or a daring innovator like Faulker. But if he had written like them, he would have destroyed the simple sincerity of his gritty, working-class tales. He was a voice for the downtrodden and an articulate critic of the abuses of capitalism in the depression years, and as such, his work from the 30s tends to exalt him as a spokesman for a generation of ordinary Americans, making him a sort of guitar-free version of Woody Guthrie.
I think it was Steinbeck who first taught me about the harsh realities of capitalism, and shook me out of the innocence of childhood. The passage below is from The Grapes of Wrath. Its simple, direct eloquence moved me and awakened my social consciousness when I was a young teen. I remember being horrified by a reality I had never imagined in my Howdy Doody childhood, and thinking that there was something deeply wrong with any system that allows some men to engage in the wanton destruction of food while their countrymen are starving.
“The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit — and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate — died of malnutrition — because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
I asked my parents whether that really happened, whereupon they just shrugged their shoulders with heavy resignation, for they had chosen to ignore the parts of that time that they preferred to forget. In my experience, the people of The Greatest Generation had a very selective memory of their youth, choosing to bathe it all in the glow of hardships survived, a common enemy vanquished, and a better world passed on to posterity. They generally preferred to recall their victories rather than to chronicle the ugly specifics of the deprivation they endured, the enemies they faced, or the ideologies they may have embraced during desperate times. So perhaps Steinbeck deserved that Nobel Prize for passing on to subsequent generations a sense of the outrage that people felt in real time, and helping those of us born into cozy post-war prosperity to understand – viscerally – the sort of world our parents and grandparents had endured and, if among the fortunate, had survived.
Hina Kagei topless in the premiere episode of Plastic Beauty
Japanese series now on Netflix.
When a surgeon shifts to aesthetics and clashes with a celebrity doctor, she discovers the complex pressures behind the pursuit of physical perfection. In the first episode, she saves a young influencer’s life by removing a dangerous silicone implant, thus sabotaging the young woman’s career. This sparks a firestorm.
Hina’s topless scenes mostly involve prosthetics.
In this case, we see one of her real breasts and one prosthetic overlay.
Jane March naked in The Lover (1992)
Jean-Jacques Annaud is one of the most interesting filmmakers in the world.
He is extremely proficient. He takes a back seat to nobody when it comes to photographic composition, and his films always seem to be scored beautifully. The factor that has kept him from being recognized as the one of the world’s greatest filmmakers is his choice of projects. He’s a guy who doesn’t like repeating himself, and likes to march to his own drummer. In 1986, he made a movie of The Name of the Rose, based on Umberto Eco’s talky, convoluted, multi-lingual masterpiece that plays out like Sherlock Holmes in the Dark Ages. That film was hailed by many critics as a masterpiece, and I’d agree, but it managed only a seven million dollar domestic gross to help offset its twenty million dollar budget.
So did he try for something more commercial next time? Not on your life. He filmed The Bear, a movie which has few humans and almost no dialogue. It is literally a story about a family of bears. This time, he managed a healthy $30 million gross. His other projects have included Seven Years in Tibet, and Enemy at the Gates.
Now, imagine what would happen if a filmmaker of that caliber decided to make a soft-core porn film. Well, ol’ Jean-Jacques did just that. How did the process work?
Obviously, he didn’t need any help in cinematography or scoring or costumes or set design. His films have been nominated for about a gazillion Cesars, and several Oscars. What he did need was an erotic project which also had substantial literary and cinematic merit, something on the level of D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence himself had already been overdone, but the book which came to Annaud’s attention was a semi-autobiographical account by Marguerite Duras about how she lost her lost her virginity. This met all his criteria:
* It was lurid. Duras pictured her relationship with a handsome, dashing, refined Chinese man old enough to be her father. Although her account is probably a fanciful gussied-up version of the reality, it was exactly the kind of sensationalistic story Annaud needed. The Duras character was 15 at the time of her deflowering, and the make-up people managed to make the actress (Jane March) look even younger.
* It had a valid literary pedigree. Duras was a female, a respected writer, and an intellectual. She wrote 34 novels, and was considered among the inner circle of Parisian intellectuals. She directed 16 films of her own. Her literary credentials were further buttressed by the fact that she was a war hero who once saved Mitterand’s life! Her credentials and character simply cannot be impugned. These facts tend to dodge artfully around potential objections. Using a woman’s actual words obviates the potential objections from hard-core feminists, and using the words of an accepted literary figure skirts around the age issue. (Do you hear many objections to staging Romeo and Juliet? Well, that’s a play about a guy who sleeps with a 13 year old girl!)
* It had a perfect cinematic setting. Annaud may have passed on this project if the story had taken place in Shaker Heights, Ohio in 1972, but it actually takes place in French Colonial Vietnam in 1929, so Annaud was able to create an exotic world for his imagery.
So how did it turn out?
The film’s cinematographer, Robert Fraisse, was nominated for an Oscar, so the answer is “very well.” See for yourself:
Not bad for a little sex flick, eh? It is certainly the best-photographed skin flick ever made. It is photographed pretty much as well as any flick, skin or not. You could stack it up next to Barry Lyndon or Crouching Tiger or Days of Heaven any other movie you could name, and it would not be embarrassed at all.
The film is backed by a solid score and features Duras’s own words, so it maintains a consistent tone and atmosphere which is sensuous and beautiful. Many women like this film, despite the explicit content. I wish I could tell you that the whole is as good as its best parts, but it isn’t. It is painfully (if artfully) slow. There’s really nothing Annaud could do about the pacing. You can either have good, realistic sex or a fast-paced narrative, but it isn’t possible to do both. Obviously, if you’re going to interrupt the film’s momentum for five minutes of semi-explicit sex, the storyline is not going to advance. Given the need to balance the story and the sex, the slow pacing is understandable.
Is the sex truly that realistic? It seems very real, whether it was or not. Annaud acted like the sex scenes were real in order to drum up publicity and controversy. Jane March was both deeply offended and disgusted. March and Annaud didn’t speak for about ten years due to the rumors. The director finally apologized to her in 2003.
There is one scene where there appears to be real genital contact (at about the 1:50 mark in video #8 below). It was allegedly performed by a body double.
This is one of the best, most accurate films ever made about forbidden, purely sexual relationships, and one of the most explicit films that you can watch “as a couple,” and find that she enjoys it more than you do.
Jane March
Lisa Faulkner
A few Jane March frames brightened or enlarged or both.
Arnijka Larcombe-Weate topless in Carnal Vessels (2025)
Australian body-swap comedy. Available free on TUBI
Two friends inexplicably swap bodies after a night of intimacy, and must contend with living as each other while partaking in sexually-charged misadventures over a long, hot weekend.
Ella Ballentine at TIFF
She is also pictured at the Globes and in a studio set.
I wasn’t really aware of her, but she has definitely gotten my attention now.
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in a sheer top
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was at the Saint Laurent Spring/Summer show in Paris.
I used to think she was a world-class beauty. She looked like this:
What happened to her face? Did she just get older? Did she starve herself? Did she undergo procedures? All of the above?
Bianca Censori in a sheer top
Bianca Censori wore a see-through top when going with husband Ye to a private viewing of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles!
