(Credits: Far Out / De’Andre Bush)
Wed 1 April 2026 16:45, UK
Age ratings have long guided us towards what we’re meant to (and not meant to) watch – as children and teenagers, watching movies we were not old enough to legally view was often our first act of rebellion. What could be more scandalous than watching a PG without parental guidance?
Since the establishment of cinema as a proper art form and one of the most popular forms of entertainment, censorship boards have formed across the world to monitor the kind of content being served up to audiences… Is it age-appropriate? Is there anything that simply needs to be edited out for risk of offending or traumatising a wide viewership?
Moral panics have come and gone over the years – who can forget when British institution the BBFC went crazy over the apparent threat of video nasties in the 1980s – but for the most part, age ratings are a pretty good thing. There’s no need to sell a 12-year-old a DVD featuring grisly violence and explicit sex.
In America, the Motion Picture Association decides what age rating is given to each film, although it’s not a legal requirement – movies are allowed to be screened even if they don’t have an age rating… This system was established when the Hays Code fell out of use in 1968, ushering in a new era for Hollywood that wasn’t half as restrictive as it had been for the past few decades.
While a G allows absolutely anyone to watch a movie, a PG advises that “some material may not be suitable for children,” and a PG-13 suggests that “some material may be inappropriate for children under 13” – then you jump into the heavier stuff, with R-rated movies advertising themselves as ‘under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian’… While the UK has a 15 rating following PG and 12, which seems to be a good midpoint, America skips straight from PG-13 to R, and then you hit NC-17, which replaced the X-rating in 1990.
The first movie to be rated NC-17 for “extreme violence”
“No one 17 and under admitted,” reads the warning, although that doesn’t mean that the movie is going to contain pornography, as ‘X-rated’ films suggest. Rather, NC-17 movies are those which contain a strong amount of nudity, sex, violence, or excessive drug use – essentially anything that is so intense and shocking that conservative and religious groups would probably rush to ban it.
An adaptation of Anaïs Nin’s Henry and June was the first movie to earn an NC-17 rating, but two years later, a different title became the first to be given the rating purely for its sheer levels of violence. Intent to Kill, directed by Charles T Kanganis, featured Gilmore Girls’ Scott Patterson and pornographic-star-turned-John-Waters muse Traci Lords, and focused on some heavy themes of prostitution and drug trafficking.
The film saw Lords play a police officer who decides to go undercover to try to investigate a prostitution ring, while her boyfriend, also a police officer, similarly gets pulled into this dark criminal world. There are plenty of violent fights between gang members and thugs as Lords’ Vickie and Patterson’s Al get themselves a little too wrapped up in the danger.
In the UK, it was released as an 18, although several seconds had to be cut by the BBFC for it to be passed. While the movie hasn’t really endured as anything very memorable, it does stand as a landmark in the American film rating system, nabbing the first NC-17 rating for “extreme violence,” not sex.
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