love
Graham Fuller
Pushing 40, Simple Passion’s Hélène (Laetitia Dosch) lectures Paris college students on poetry and is single mother to pre-adolescent Paul (Lou Teymour-Thion). Blessed with a bountiful Deneuve-ian mane, she’s a pale but unfallen bloom in her late thirties passionately entwined, as often as she can be, with the younger Aleksandr (Sergei Polunin), a vulpine, taciturn Russian Embassy security operative (i.e. muscle), who sometimes flies home for marital vacations.“Even feminists become submissive when they fall in love,” the manstruck heroine tells her friend Anita (Caroline Ducey), blaming the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Do you want to spend 105 minutes trapped in a house with two people arguing, or do you already feel that your life under lockdown is quite quarrelsome and claustrophobic enough? If your answer is the former, then Malcolm & Marie is the perfect movie for you. Everyone else might be happier escaping elsewhere (I’d recommend Call My Agent if you want to enjoy actors talking about their trade. At least you get some exterior Paris scenes and lashings of wit). But let’s get back to the matter in hand. Forced to put their TV series Euphoria on hold because of Read more ...
Owen Richards
Romcoms. We all know the tried and tested formula: immature guy, uptight girl, they meet, they like each other, hate each other, and end up in love. It’s as reliable as it is unrealistic, and sometimes it takes a film like Baby Done to remind you there is a better way. One that is funnier, more believable, and yes, even more romantic.Stand-up comic Rose Matafeo and Harry Potter alum Matthew Lewis star as Zoe and Tim, the last couple standing in the marriage and baby stakes. Everyone else is boring and settling down, but these two (and Zoe’s new-age friend Molly) are quite happy as things are Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sometimes in fictional cinema, a character can seem so strong, so righteous, that you begin to doubt the reality of the piece. How can anyone be that good when faced with such hardship? Perhaps these thoughts make us feel better about ourselves, and what we do with our lives. But we can make no excuses with Time, a documentary about a woman so remarkable that it could only be true.In 1997, married couple Fox and Rob Rich had a family and a failing business. In desperation, they attempted armed robbery of a bank. Fox was incarcerated for three and a half years, and her husband was sentenced to Read more ...
theartsdesk
There are films to meet every taste in theartsdesk's guide to the best movies currently on release. In our considered opinion, any of the titles below is well worth your attention.Enola Holmes ★★★★ Millie Bobby Brown gives the patriarchy what-for in a new Sherlock-related franchiseEternal Beauty ★★★★ Craig Roberts's fantasy conjurs surreal images and magnetic performancesI'm Thinking of Ending Things ★★★★ Charlie Kaufman's eerie road trip through love and lossLes Misérables ★★★★★ An immersive, morally complex thriller set in the troubled suburbs of present day ParisMax Richter's Sleep ★★★★ Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
The first words of Sunnymead Court, a new play at the Tristan Bates Theatre, are ominous. “We are transitioning from human experiences to digital experiences.” Oof. Thankfully, this isn’t another gloomy lockdown drama about the evils of Zoom quizzes – it’s the story of an unlikely romance between two women who live metres from each other, but have never spoken. We meet Marie (Gemma Lawrence, who also wrote the piece) first – a socially-anxious copywriter with a strict routine, which includes blasting William Onyeabor’s "Fantastic Man" at 11am every day. Stella (Remmie Milner, pictured Read more ...
Nick Hasted
I’m Thinking of Ending Things ends in a giddying gusher of weirdness, the steady drip of earlier oddness finally bursting its narrative banks, till a horror scene becomes a Gene Kelly ballet, and an Oklahoma! tune is sung in bitter valediction by a male lead now resembling elderly Charles Foster Kane. It’s a Charlie Kaufman overdose, trashing convention to alienating effect. And yet this also stays his simplest chamber piece, about a young couple driving to meet the boyfriend’s parents in the country one snowy night.Later, you forget the first sight of Lucy (Jessie Buckley) as she lets a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Originally due to premiere back in March, Sleepless – a musical version of the winning 1993 movie Sleepless in Seattle – now acts as a test case for the return of fully staged but socially distanced indoor theatre, AKA Stage 4 of the Government’s “roadmap”. Though a musical adaptation premiered in the States in 2013, this is billed as a new work, with a fresh book by Michael Burdette and score by Brits Robert Scott and Brendan Cull. Bravo to all involved for bringing audiences back safely and enthusiastically, even if the show itself, contrary to its title, is a tad more somnolent than might Read more ...
mark.kidel
The emotional rawness of Xavier Dolan’s films reflects a rare humanity and empathy. For someone still only 31, the French-Canadian writer and director displays an uncanny sense of the passionate turmoil that animates his characters. The subtle shifts in moods he achieves may often be sustained through an unusual talent for picking the right music or song, but the tone is never set in a way that manipulates the audience. This makes for a movie that feels powerfully authentic and for this reason deeply touching without ever being sentimental.The central story of his eighth film focuses on the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Musings on the agonies of adolescent love fall like dead weight in this wearying if well-acted adaptation by writer-director Richard Tanne of the 2016 Young Adult novel Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland. 17-year-old Henry Page (Austin Abrams) falls hard for Grace Torn (Lili Reinhart, from TV's Riverdale), the indrawn new transfer student at his New Jersey high school who walks with a cane and speaks of needing her sins erased.Henry craves experience and gets rather more than he bargained for from the anguished Grace, with whom he bonds over Pablo Neruda sonnets and shared work on the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We’ve already had The Last Five Years in lockdown; now, we get a digital production of American composer Jason Robert Brown’s earliest work. A series of wistful pop/jazz numbers loosely linked thematically, rather than narratively, this 1995 abstract musical features various characters responding to a moment that upends their lives. Formally, it’s another Brown show that suits our current circumstances, since the songs are mainly standalone solos, and the performers’ various homes work fine as background; no need for a helicopter or falling chandelier in this one.The central idea also speaks Read more ...
Owen Richards
At a point in the early noughties, every third film was a teen comedy about a road trip to lose one's virginity. It’s a genre most were glad to see the back of. What a pleasant surprise Come As You Are is then, which brings much needed heart and relevancy to this tired trope.Based on a true story, we follow Scotty, Matt and Mo as they travel to Montreal to visit a brothel. But this isn’t some sleezy trip – each of the characters has a physical disability, and with their parents as their primary carers, having an active sex life has been nearly impossible. So, with the support of driver/nurse Read more ...