sex
Album: Drake - Certified Lover BoySunday, 05 September 2021
Certified Lover Boy is not a mixtape, a playlist or a collection of loosies, but an Album. With a capital A. This is a distinction Drake makes when it’s time to get serious, when he wants us to sit up and listen intently. Unfortunately, Drake Albums... Read more... |
Zola review - high-energy comic thriller tackles sex workThursday, 05 August 2021
It’s hard to imagine a movie more of its time than Zola, as it takes on sex, race, the glamorisation of porn and the allure of the ever-online world. For 90 minutes we are embedded in the lives of two young American sex workers and it’s a wild ride... Read more... |
Sex/Life, Netflix review - Mills & Boon for the YouPorn era?Tuesday, 13 July 2021
Has Netflix succeeded in reshaping Mills & Boon for the YouPorn era? Though situated in a contemporary New York where empowered women run investment companies, earn doctorates in psychology from Columbia University, and deliver forceful lectures... Read more... |
Rosie Wilby: The Breakup Monologues review - do breakups make us stronger, better people?Tuesday, 01 June 2021
According to Rosie Wilby, “breaking up and staying together are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a flick of a switch apart, separated only by one fleeting moment of madness, or perhaps clarity.” Wilby’s book The Breakup Monologues: The... Read more... |
The One, Netflix review - the downside of scientific matchmakingThursday, 18 March 2021
Readers of John Marrs’s 2017 novel The One should probably look away now, since Netflix’s dramatisation of the story bears scant resemblance to the book. The basic premise – that a corporation has invented a method of DNA testing which can match... Read more... |
Album: LOUISAHHH - The Practice of Freedom (HE.SHE.THEY.)Thursday, 11 March 2021
Somewhere in dance culture or other, the Eighties revival has now been going on more than twice as long as the actual Eighties did. Starting around 1998, it reached an initial peak in the early 2000s as the dayglo-fashion led electroclash, but... Read more... |
Katherine Angel: Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again review – the complexities of consentMonday, 08 March 2021
Katherine Angel borrows the title of her latest book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, from an essay by Foucault. The phrase parodies the supposed sexual liberation on the horizon in the ‘60s and ‘70s, picking apart the notion that sexuality and... Read more... |
Berlinale 2021: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn review – cheeky, timely and very provocativeThursday, 04 March 2021
The Romanian director Radu Jude invariably serves spicy satire that challenges his compatriots to face historical crimes and present failings. The latest is an erudite and daft, raunchy and knockabout, endlessly provocative film that, for sake of... Read more... |
PVT CHAT review - the cam girl who loved meSaturday, 13 February 2021
An initially off-putting erotic comedy thriller about the relationship between a webcam dominatrix, “Scarlet” (Julia Fox), and the Internet gambler, Jack (Peter Vack), who becomes obsessed with her, Ben Hozie’s sexually graphic PVT CHAT becomes... Read more... |
Simple Passion review – a case of female amour fouSaturday, 06 February 2021
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... Read more... |
Blu-ray: LibertéTuesday, 19 January 2021
Catalan director Albert Serra’s interest in late 18th century France is well established – his previous film was The Death of Louis XIV – but the title of his new one has precious little to do with the triadic revolutionary slogan that swept away... Read more... |
Book extract: Nativity by Jean Frémon, with drawings by Louise BourgeoisMonday, 16 November 2020How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Frémon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to represent the saviour of humankind without his swaddling clothes. The... Read more... |
