As Literary Review's "Bad Sex in Fiction Award" recognises, there's not a lot that's funnier and more damaging to a story's credibility than an attempt to be sexy that falls flat or, even better, that misfires spectacularly. Some of the most famous movie duds - Showgirls, Body of Evidence, Boxing Helena, Colour of Night - which are beloved of course by a certain type of film enthusiast, this reviewer included, strive for smouldering and deliver mainly laughs.

“I’m going to make a porn film with these two,” Charlotte Gainsbourg remembers her Melancholia director Lars von Trier telling the press, indicating her and Kirsten Dunst. Nymphomaniac sounds like that film. In fact it’s another sometimes baggy, sometimes gripping study of a female rebel’s psychological state. Gainsbourg’s Joe (pictured below), is a nymphomaniac, but the erections and penetrations which mark her passage through the world are both fundamental and incidental. Porn is the aspect of sex this film is least interested in.

Anybody who has read Rupert Everett's book Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins will be well aware of his fascination with sex and prostitution, so it's no surprise to find him very much in his element as writer and presenter of the two-part Channel 4 series Love for Sale. In part one, showing on Monday 28 April, he goes on a European tour of "sex workers" (though Everett prefers the old-fashioned "prostitutes"), investigating the wildly varying ways and circumstances in which sex is sold.

When was the last time you took a swipe at someone, and I mean a real swipe - a physical, emotional, cruel, unapologetic swipe of the sort that comes thick and fast in Vicky Jones's exhilarating new play, The One? The three-hander returns the actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge to the site of her solo (and Olivier-nominated) triumph, Fleabag, only this time in a play written by the colleague who directed her last time out.

We first see the bank clerk, who can’t bear his dull life, serving behind the cashier's till, like an automaton. In Melly Still's hugely inventive, visually stunning multimedia production of From Morning to Midnight – Georg Kaiser's fearlessly weird German Expressionist drama from 1912 – Adam Godley's Clerk starts out as a desiccated nonentity, nose to the grindstone.

You wait ages for a French film about a teenage girl's sexual awakening and then two come along at once. Actually who am I kidding? As any filmic Francophile will tell you it's not exactly a rarity. Still, red-hot on the heels of the astonishing Blue is the Warmest Colour comes François Ozon's Jeune et Jolie.

Sexual intercourse was, famously, invented in 1963. Before that, of course, babies were delivered by beak. So Channel 4’s Sex Season marks the golden jubilee for shaggers. Perhaps there should be bunting and pageantry throughout the land. Instead we’ve got the blank-firing Sex Box and, as of last night, Masters of Sex.

Sex in a box, in a nutshell. That was the concept. Not literally in a nutshell, as that might have been difficult. But a big white cuboid thing in a studio. Designed – this is an educated guess - by Ikea, being tacky and easily assembled. Couples enter the box and, with luck, each other, and then come and talk about it, in front of a panel of sexperts. What could possibly, in the United Kingdom of embarrassment and irony, go even slightly wrong?

This week Channel 4 embarks on a season of programmes about sex. Real sex, it claims, in real British bedrooms. A new series called Masters of Sex dramatises the story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who from 1957 pioneered research into sexual response. And then there is Sex Box, in which couples will perform the eponymous activity in the eponymous container and then come out and discuss it in front of Mariella Frostrup and a live audience. Would such a thing have been imaginable without Shere Hite?

The new puritanism of the American cinema continues apace with Thanks For Sharing, which follows on from the more elegantly made but comparably dispiriting Shame in positing Manhattan as the most sexually dysfunctional place on earth. What did New York do (besides elect Michael Bloomberg as mayor three times over) to deserve all this carnal angst and obsessiveness and shame? Lord knows, but even the wonderful Mark Ruffalo can't lift the spirits of a film that wallows in its therapy-speak environs.