love
Owen Richards
He's one of Japan's foremost directors, and if you’ve witnessed one of his films before, you know what to expect from a Takashi Miike yakuza film. High-octane, boundary pushing fun from first frame to last. And that’s exactly what First Love is.The plot is simultaneously complicated and simple. The ambitious but hapless Kase plans on stealing drugs from his own yakuza boss and blame it on the triads. This involves his cop accomplice killing Monica, an escort prone to hallucinations. But when a young boxer, Leo, steps in to save Monica, the whole plan starts to fall apart.What follows is an Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The fast-rising young actor Jack Quaid comes naturally by the ease with which he takes to Plus One, a modern-day inheritor of the sorts of romcoms his mum, Meg Ryan, used to do alongside Tom Hanks. Playing a damagingly choosy singleton called Ben who realises that love has been staring him in the face all along, Quaid lends undeniable charm to a movie that often pushes back hard against it. Let's just say that Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer, the film's co-directors and writers, have come up with a putative partner for Ben whom audiences may well give up on, even if Ben ultimately doesn't: his Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There’s slight (White Christmas, to name but one) and then there’s The Boy Friend, a period musical so unabashedly vaporous that if you sneeze, it might blow away. All credit then to the Menier Chocolate Factory for anchoring Sandy Wilson’s onetime theatrical mainstay in a sustainedly nostalgic billow of song and dance to draw attention away from the fact that comparatively little of consequence happens across three acts. Matthew White's production would seem to be predicated on the assumption that nature abhors a vacuum, in which case, when in doubt, dance – and why not? Read more ...
Owen Richards
Ophelia is one of Shakespeare’s most iconic yet underdeveloped dramatic roles. A sweet and naïve girl, she’s driven mad by Hamlet’s wavering affections and her father’s death. She was often the subject of paintings, yet rarely of novels until the 21st century. Ophelia, starring Daisy Ridley, is an adaptation of Lisa Klein’s 2006 book of the same name, and does a valiant job at not only filling in the blanks but bringing some flair of its own.Ophelia is a precocious child of the Danish court, handpicked by Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts, pictured below right) to join her ladies-in-waiting. She Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Professor Punch (Damon Herriman) was once famed throughout the lands as a masterful puppeteer, performing shows night after night with his dutiful wife Judy (Mia Wasikowska). Now, they have been relegated to the provinces. Specifically, the backwash of Seaside, Judy’s hometown far from the coast (as the prologue informs us), where they are raising their baby. They live amidst the daily stoning of presumed witches, and the paranoid grumblings of the small-minded citizenry. As odd couples go, they couldn’t be less well-suited. Punch is a philandering alcoholic with a short-fused temper. Judy on Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The Beggar’s Opera: does any piece of music theatre promise more fun and deliver more tedium? Yes, it was the satirical smash of 1728; yes, it inspired Brecht and Weill; yes, with its combination of popular melodies and a topical script it was effectively the world’s first jukebox musical. I get all that. I'm fortunate enough to live with an historian of 18th century theatre. Seriously: we talk about John Rich and Colley Cibber over breakfast. Yet time and again, as another thicket of Georgian slang gives way to another blink-and-you-miss-it musical number, I’ve found myself thinking of David Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Forty years after the classic, multi-Oscar winning Kramer v Kramer comes another divorce drama involving two young Americans and a son caught in the crossfire. And this one is even better. Marriage Story is a sublime film, a heart-breaking, intimate epic. It’s written and directed by Noah Baumbach, the New Yorker whose impressive back catalogue includes The Squid and The Whale (also about divorce), Greenberg and Frances Ha. His new film leaves no stone unturned in its dissection of marital upheaval. And it features superb, deeply moving Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Keane were always the best of that post-millennium Coldplay crowd. Tim Rice-Oxley showed adult craft in his lyrics and keyboard textures on their 5 million-selling debut, Hopes and Fears, where the small-town specificity of Battle, Sussex’s biggest band lifted singer Tom Chaplin’s yearning. Six years after they effectively broke up, this fifth album’s title announces itself as a sequel, dissecting Rice-Oxley’s divorce (foreshadowed in 2012’s Strangeland) with forensic relish.“You’re Not Home” describes the split’s aftermath like that of a neutron bomb: “bike wheels still turning” on the back Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We're saying goodbye to a much treasured friend. Fleabag will live on, of course – other actresses have and will inhabit the role – but Phoebe Waller-Bridge, its creator, has said this short run at Wyndham's Theatre is the last time she will perform the character on stage.And so that knowledge makes this deliciously filthy and witty monologue – about a twentysomething woman who attracts trouble – even more enjoyable. It was first staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013 and Waller-Bridge later performed it at Soho Theatre in London and, more recently, SoHo Playhouse in New York, gaining a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Joanna Hogg’s melancholy autobiographical drama The Souvenir cuts too close to the bone. That’s a compliment: like Sally Rooney’s equally unsettling first novel Conversations With Friends, Hogg’s movie almost forces the viewer to relive that shattering early romance, founded on collusion and self-delusion, that reordered her or his universe for all time.Like Conversations With Friends, too, The Souvenir, set in the first half of the 1980s, depicts a young woman’s affair with a withholding older man. Whereas Rooney’s protagonist Frances is a poor Dublin undergraduate enmeshed with a married Read more ...
Owen Richards
There were some early warning signs that A Faithful Man might be another box-ticking French romcom. The poster of two women kissing one man, his bemused look in the middle. The lethargic narration referencing childhood and the mysteries of the female mind. Here we go again. But director, writer and star Louis Garrel (pictured above left) subverts expectations just enough to make this French fancy stand out from the pack.Abel (Garrel) is caught off guard by his girlfriend Marianne (Laetitia Casta, pictured below right) when she announces she’s pregnant. For you see, it’s not his. It’s Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“Movies are all the same,” says one character in Photograph, the latest film from India independent director, Ritesh Batra. It’s true, the plot feels familiar, but if stories are all the same, it’s how you play with the form that makes a film a success or not. Batra once again shows he knows how to craft a good story. Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a struggling street photographer. His days are spend snapping tourists next to the Gateway of India in Mumbai. It’s in this tourist trap that he meets Miloni (Sanya Malhotra), a younger woman who is still living at home and studying to become Read more ...