sex
Graham Fuller
What would loving Gilda Farrell be like? I do mean Gilda, and not Rita Hayworth, who was 27 when she portrayed her. The flamboyantly seductive persona Gilda has adopted to drive men crazy obscures the true nature of a woman who learns it brings out the worst in them and that it's a heavy burden to carry. As the actress ruefully remarked of her husbands, “They all married Gilda, but they woke up with me” - a telling putdown of the erotic artifice in which she herself was draped. The “clothed” striptease Gilda electrifyingly performs in Charles Vidor’s perverse and sophisticated film Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Wage-slave purgatory in three different flavours is the subject of Seth Gordon's comedy, as his trio of downtrodden leads decide that the only way to break free from remorseless professional abuse is by murdering their respective bosses. George Cukor this ain't - in fact, Gordon has succeeded in making Carry On up the Khyber look like a revered art-house masterpiece - but as long as you leave your brain in "Park", there are just enough laughs to drag you to the closing credits.Jason Bateman plays Nick, a dogged corporate yes man at Comnidine Industries who deludes himself that his boss VP Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Filmed in 1969 by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, the London-set Deep End captures the late-Sixties comedown mood. The lack of swinging trappings, a perverse attitude to sexuality and the dowdy mundanity of its setting make the film compelling viewing. Jane Asher may have once been the girlfriend of a Beatle, but this is no Sixties romp.The presence of the then-unknown Krautrock band Can (The Can, as they were then) on the soundtrack immediately indicates that this isn’t a normal Sixties yarn. Skolimowski had collaborated with Roman Polanski on Knife in the Water and, post-Repulsion Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For a couple of years now British theatre has been harvesting a new crop of young female talent. Market leaders such as Lucy Prebble (Enron) and Polly Stenham (That Face) have made a splash in the West End, and where they led many others have followed. Earlier this week, Lou Ramsden’s excellent horror story, Hundreds and Thousands, premiered at the Soho Theatre. And last night Penelope Skinner’s superb new play, which stars Romola Garai, opened at the Royal Court Theatre.Becky (excellently played by Garai) is pregnant. According to John, her husband, she is therefore hormonal, and a bit weird Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This was all set to be released in UK cinemas around about now, but at the last minute it has gone straight to DVD. Perhaps the distributors got nervous. You can imagine why. Kim Cattrall is a totem for all sophisticated, sexually expressive women of a certain age. She’s ultimately the reason Sex and the City was what it was. You can put gratuitous violence, killing, maiming and all manner of cheap moronic sleaze up on a big screen and rake in the moolah. But some things are just too much. Samantha as a former Eighties porn starlet, washed up, penniless and living in a trailer? That Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the many strengths of new writing for the stage is that it’s not afraid to go into the darkest and most upsetting places of the human psyche. Whether at the Royal Court or at the Bush or Soho theatres, young playwrights have dived in to explore the grimmest reaches of our imaginations. Hundreds and Thousands, which opened last night, is Lou Ramsden’s powerful and compelling account of one family’s descent into a nightmare.Lorna is not unusual. She’s a frumpy thirtysomething who wants a baby. Unable to meet a suitable man, she tries speed dating. After thus hooking up with Allan, an ice Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some theatre genres seem indestructible. One of these is the satirical city comedy, for which playwrights dip their pens in poison and spray their venom over the teeming mass of the shallow, the stupid and the successful. When they do this today, they inevitably recall all manner of past plays from Jacobean and Restoration times to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and beyond. In American Trade, a new play from the immensely talented American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, which opened last night, we revisit this familiar territory.Things start well. Pharus, a gay Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Where once was certainty is now only void.” The age of John Donne was also the age of Galileo, Milton, of Hobbes, Francis Bacon and, of course, the King James Bible, whose 400th anniversary we celebrate this year. At the intersection of politics, religion and scientific philosophy, Donne’s life under James I holds up a mirror to the conflicted age that produced this extraordinary work of scholarship. Meshing the poet’s biography, his work and social history, Jonathan Holmes has produced a play whose scholarship and subject matter may be serious, but whose theatricality is poignantly, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With more claret than a blood bank and more skin than a nudist colony, True Blood is HBO at its most gleefully provocative. Unencumbered by the cerebral depth of The Sopranos, the social conscience of The Wire, or the historical obligations of Deadwood, it’s a two-backed beast of a TV show. That’s not to say it’s not smart or satirical, but from its opening credits it announces its dishonourable intentions as a gravelly voiced stranger croons, “I wanna do bad things with you.”Based on the novels by Charlaine Harris, True Blood is the televisual brainchild of Six Feet Under’s Alan Ball. It Read more ...
mark.hudson
That Tracey Emin is one of the defining personalities of our time isn’t in doubt. Even if you never want to hear another second of her guileless wittering, another word about her abortions, traumatic early rape and relentless onanistic neediness, you can't deny that her self-effected transformation from chippy Margate outsider to big-league art-world player represents something extraordinary. As to her work, it's been difficult to be certain of her value - or to entirely write her off - as there's never been the chance to see a big enough body of her work at one time. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sensitive but unsparing, the debut feature from French writer-director Katell Quillévéré is a tender portrait of a shy, sweet teenager experiencing the first flushes of womanhood. Don’t be deterred by its somewhat sinister title; although Love Like Poison (or a Un Poison Violent, a phrase taken from a Serge Gainsbourg song) doesn’t dodge uncomfortable truths, it is distinguished and defined by its delicacy, insight and humanity.Returning from boarding school for the holidays, Anna Falguères (Clara Augarde), a taciturn teen, is confronted by the breakdown of her parents’ marriage. Her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ian, who is having problems with erectile dysfunction, is freezing his wife out. Susan thinks she may be frigid which, understandably, her husband has taken personally. They’re all a lot better off than Dave, mind. He is in love with a woman who is ideal for him but he can’t seem to get past first base. It's making him suicidal. They all acknowledge there’s a problem, because they’re all in counselling with Relate. Slightly less conventionally, they’ve all agreed to have their sessions recorded and broadcast as part of a documentary. And pushing the boat out a little further, they appear on Read more ...