Dutch actress turned-director Halina Reijn earned a lengthy standing ovation for her film Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman, at the Venice film festival this weekend, and, according to the critics, has put sex back into cinema.

The film, an erotic drama about a businesswoman who has an affair with an intern,  is Reijn’s second English language film, after 2022’s Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.

Reijn told last Friday’s news conference about the film that she wanted to make a film in that space that focused on the “female gaze”. One of the main reasons for making Babygirl, she said, was to address what she described as the “huge orgasm gap” between men and women.

Reijn told Dutch broadcaster NOS, the premier “could not have been better”. “It is fantastic that people react like this,” she said. “When they started applauding, it was an emotional reaction. A sense of relief.”

The reviews are now trickling in. New York Magazine described the film as possibly the “hottest” release of the year, while the Daily Telegraph calls it a 21st century Fatal Attraction and gives it five stars.

Vanity Fair, for example, says the film “does its noble best to have a frank—and entertaining!—dialogue about complex desire, visuals and all”.

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney describes the film as “entertaining”, not just in the actors’ ”skilled navigation of every tricky challenge but also the script’s refusal of judgment and rigid moral codes”.

“The film doesn’t go terribly deep and could stand to be 10 minutes shorter,” he says, “but it’s perverse, juicy fun of a kind we don’t get much of anymore.”

Not everyone is so enthusiastic, however. The Guardian’s reviewer Xan Brooks gave it two stars, saying “Babygirl has some useful and occasionally provocative things to say about inter-office dynamics and sexual desire, but it delivers them with the clipped, perky professionalism of an annual corporate presentation.”