Certainly in the movies mentioned in that thread, even the movies where there are arguments against the nudity being gratuitous, the nudity was not absolutely necessary. There are plenty of ways to make it clear the characters would be nude without explicitly showing it.
So what movies have nudity that is really necessary to show in the movie? Outside of porn that is, that being the an important part of those movies. Are there any movies that could not have been as good as they were without the nudity?
Sirens. Sam Neill plays an artist who does nude paintings, and Hugh Grant plays a minister who disapproves. The whole point of the movie is that nudity is not going to destroy civilization.
Chernobyl was a mini series rather than a movie, but the miners working in the nude due to the extreme heat and lack of ventilation while tunneling under the reactor was pretty non-gratuitous, and apparently historically accurate.
I think the pudgy unappealing stripper dancing behind Jeff and Shawn in the bar scene in I, Tonya is not gratuitous. Not only is she actually topless, and not one of the “sparkly bra” (non) strippers usually seen, she’s more like the kind of dancer a cheap club in a small town would have. And it underlines what a pair of pathetic fools the two are.
I’ve always thought Sigourney Weaver stripping down to her underwear in Alien was a little unneeded. Not that it wasn’t a great scene and she looked hot, but she could have kept a jump suit on or something.
Mrs. Henderson Presents. It was a movie about creating nude “tableaus” in a theater as a way to keep it from going under. It’s the entire point of the movie (and her reasoning for doing it is very touching). One important plot point is how she manages to get the censor to approve it.
12 Monkeys had a scene of Bruce Willis in a decontamination shower. In the context, a decon shower was perfectly logical and reasonable, and showing it served to illustrate just how cruel and dehumanizing the world he lived in was. It worked.
One of the X-Men movies (the third one, I think? I can’t remember the precise title) had Mystique get shot with a de-mutant-izing drug, that left Rebecca Romjin-Stamos nude and curled into a fetal position. On the one hand, of course Mystique doesn’t usually wear any clothes, because she can just simulate them with her powers, and so once stripped of her powers she’d look as naked as she actually is. And on the other hand, from a cinematic point of view, it served to highlight how vulnerable and helpless she is without her powers.
The scene that popped into my head when I read the question is from the movie Nell, with Jodie Foster. It has been many years since I saw it, but Nell was found after her mother’s death and seemed to be a young woman who was let to grow up as sort of a feral child. In one scene she was seen bathing, in a stream I think, and her nudity underlined her innocence and vulnerability.
My husband had an old episode of My 3 Sons on the other day, and I spotted Jodie as one of Dodie’s little friends, she looked to be about 7 years old. Maybe that’s why she was top of mind for me.
There’s a lesser-known but also excellent movie called “In Darkness” which is also about a man who hadn’t meant to rescue Jews but did, and it has a scene where a group of women, of all ages, are marched into the woods and shot. They’re all naked, which adds to the plot because it reflects humiliation.
