20 Movies About Cheating We Secretly Can't Stop Watching

In this movie that has recently experienced a resurgence thanks to streaming, Diane Lane plays a suburbanite bored to tears by her bland husband (Richard Gere). She then meets a sexy stranger (Olivier Martinez) and gets turned inside out by him — and wow, does this smoking hot French actor know his way around a woman's body.

Anyway, back to the movie. This beyond torrid affair does not end well, but that's what rewind buttons are for.

Everyone likes to think that they can't be bought, but lots of us watch Indecent Proposal and wonder what it would be like to be desired to the extent that someone is willing to pay $1 million for one night. We're also curious what it feels like to roll around on a bed littered with Benjamins. Demi Moore plays half of a broke married couple (hubby is played by Woody Harrelson) approached by a wealthy man (Robert Redford) who makes them an offer they don't refuse, and it destroys their marriage.

Oh, the webs we weave! In Chloe, Julianne Moore plays a woman who suspects that her college professor husband (Liam Neeson) is cheating on her with a student (Amanda Seyfried). This chick is an escort on the side, because student debt is real, guys — so wifey hires her, and that's when things get interesting.

Chloe is definitely not what we expected.

Game of Thrones alum Nikolai Coster-Waldau going horizontal on screen is never a bad thing, but this comedy is less about sexy times and more about taking revenge on a cheating dude. Cameron Diaz stars as a woman who thought she was in a great relationship until she found out her guy was married. She teams up with his wife (Leslie Mann) and a third woman he's been seeing (Kate Upton) to make him pay big time.

It's amazing, but Fatal Attraction barely has any sex in it. It's actually a cautionary tale about cheating, especially with an unstable person who is not above boiling a pet bunny and threatening to kill an entire family. Michael Douglas plays the cheating husband, and Glenn Close, of course, plays the woman who goes bananas after their one-weekend cheatfest.

Between all the gorgeous actors, the super steamy scenes, and the beautiful setting of Barcelona, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is endlessly watchable. Two best friends — one a single free spirit (Scarlett Johansson), and the other an engaged, then married repressed soul (Rebecca Hall) — spend the summer in Spain. Basically, they take turns bedding a Spanish artist (Javier Bardem) and his crazy ex-wife (Penélope Cruz).

The title says it all, but Lust Stories shows even more. It's really four short films about sex and relationships in contemporary India, with plenty of secret sexy times peppered into the stories. India may be more known for relatively wholesome Bollywood musicals, but it's also got plenty of filmmakers who walk on the wild side. More, please!

Suburbia is a breeding ground for affairs, this we know. There's only so much grocery shopping, laundry, and homework sessions people can do before they seek release from the extreme boredom. In this exploration of suburbia as prison, Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson play stay-at-home parents married to other people who start an affair between Little League games. And at one point, they enjoy a session on top of a washer in a basement. 

So relatable.

Two best friends and a dying married woman who wants to live life before she goes take a road trip together. Hmmm. What do we think will happen? 

Well, that, yes — but we'd be willing to be that few people who watched this funny and sexy Mexican movie saw that other thing coming: Two guys going from buddies to lovers, which changes them forever.

Oscar-winning film The English Patient has developed a bad rap over the years for being a bit melodramatic (just ask Seinfeld's Elaine). And while that's true, it's also true that affairs like the one portrayed in the movie — between a passionate woman who settled when she married a friend, and an amoral explorer — can have devastating repercussions.

The first sex scene between secret lovers, played by Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in this movie takes place in a wheat field … in the rain — and their subsequent hookups (before the affair turns deadly) are equally hot. There's a lot of shirt ripping and blindfolding and heavy panting between the two pretty actors. 

We're not complaining.

This beautifully acted movie is not explicit, but steadily builds tension as it explores how the simple act of two women loving each other can be so threatening to a community. In this case, the community is a conservative Jewish one, from which Rachel Weisz's character is banished after getting busted carrying on with a female friend (Rachel McAdams) as a teen. When she returns years later for her dad's funeral, she finds her former flame has married a man, but has not been successful in "praying the gay away." 

And so they discover that the heat of their passion has not died down.

Science says that the range of what turns women on is much wider than a man's, and that probably would come as no surprise to many women who have watched this film and found the scenes where Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are together so compelling. Much of that is due to the two straight actors — who play closeted men married to women — not being afraid to be emotionally vulnerable and intimate on screen.

We checked, and Joaquin Phoenix was 21 when he made this movie about a weather girl (played by Nicole Kidman) who seduces a high-school student and gets him to kill her husband. So we don't feel gross watching them getting busy, and in any case, the movie is too good to miss — featuring one of Nicole's best early performances and a great, weirdly funny script.

This classic movie is très French but without the subtitles. Set in the (surprise!) wild 1800s in France, it seems like everyone in it is sleeping with someone other than their spouse or fiancé. Dangerous Liaisons is basically a sport and a way of life, especially for one scamp (played by a young John Malkovich) whose entire mission in life is to seduce married women — until he falls in love with one (Michelle Pfeiffer), and ultimately destroys her and himself. Well-written and highly entertaining, it also features Glenn Close, then-newcomer Uma Thurman, and Keanu Reeves.

In Notes on a Scandal, Cate Blanchett plays an art teacher named Sheba who begins an affair with a teen student at the same time that she forms a friendship with an older closeted female colleague (Judi Dench). The movie is actually borderline campy fun, as Judi's character, Barbara, blackmails Sheba into spending time with her in return for her keeping quiet about the affair — and the fallout for both is not pretty.

Written and directed by Noah Baumbach, Marriage Story is a movie about what happens when a marriage falls apart and the painful aftermath that comes with divorce. Scarlett Johansson (yeah, she's been in a few of these) and Adam Driver play the former happily wed wife and husband, who have to juggle co-parenting their son after the husband's affair contributes to the downfall of their relationship.

Gone Girl is a true masterpiece for a lot of reasons, but it wouldn't be as amazing as it is without that inciting incident: Amy (Rosamund Pike) finding out that her husband, Nick (Ben Affleck), has been cheating on her with one of his students. She then sets off on a master plot to frame him for her murder as revenge.

Sometimes, exactly what you want is a teen rom-com, and this one is early 2000s perfection. In John Tucker Must Die, Sophia Bush, Brittany Snow, Ashanti, and Arielle Kebbel all team up to get revenge on John (Jesse Metcalfe), the boy they discovered has been playing all of them.

The Girl on the Train stars Emily Blunt as a newly divorced woman who gets way too involved in a total stranger's affair. Obsessed with her ex-husband's new life, she discovers that his neighbor is cheating on her husband — and this turns into a truly wild ride of a thriller movie.