sex
alexandra.coghlan
Finding a cheerful Australian film these days is quite a challenge. Having discovered the particular affinity between Australia’s parched and expansive landscape and the genres of horror and misery memoir, the nation’s filmmakers have set about exploiting it with an enthusiasm that reliably finds a pile of corpses – physical or emotional – bloodily heaped by the time the closing credits roll. Beautiful Kate is no exception, but if you can brave its confronting gaze you’ll find one of this year’s most delicate and accomplished films staring back at you.The film opens with lingering shots of a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This award-winning series, created by Tom Kapinos in 2007, is groundbreaking television even by Showtime’s daring standards. Californication is a dark - very dark - comedy drama about Hank Moody (David Duchovny), a bad-boy writer who has lost his literary mojo, but absolutely not his mojo mojo, as it were; it has nudity a-gogo, frequent sex scenes, recreational drug-taking and frank discussion of sexual matters.
Some have accused it of being a male fantasy writ large - and Duchovny’s admission that he had been treated for that most modern of conditions, sex addiction, appeared to give Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The arrival of Gainsbourg: Vie Héroique in British cinemas this week – under its Anglo-Saxon title Gainsbourg – assumes that distributors think there’s an audience. Even so, Gainsbourg hardly has the appeal of a Johnny Cash biopic. Or even an Ike Turner biopic. The release continues a process that began in the early 1990s, when a slow, posthumous rise to recognition of Serge Gainsbourg began outside the Francophone world, au delà de l’Hexagon. France might be a non-stop train ride from London, but this particular Gallic cultural icon has taken a while to make a mark over here.Which means that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Julianne Moore (b. 1960) is a true rarity. It’s not just that her hair flames like no other star since Katharine Hepburn. Or that alone of her generation she seems impervious to middle age’s indignities. There’s something else. Having worked with dinosaurs in The Lost World and a cannibal in Hannibal, she is mainstream enough to be considered a genuine leading lady. But much of her most eye-catching work, often written for her by indie directors like Todd Haynes and Paul Thomas Anderson, is fiercely extreme in spirit. Pornography, incest, erotica of various hues – hers would be bargepole Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Travelling along at 140kph in a Mercedes in a police convoy on the wrong side of the road with Prince, and Portuguese fado singer and his new protégé Ana Moura in the front, plus the artist’s agent and Rolling Stones sax player Tim Ries, is pretty rock’n’roll, I can assure you. But it was the only way to get to the gig outside Lisbon in time at last week’s Super Rock Festival. Otherwise it would have taken hours as the traffic jammed to a standstill. A lot of disgruntled paying punters didn’t make it, but over 30,000 managed to arrive, with cars trailing back half way to the city. And the Read more ...
anne.billson
Sex, blood and shocking - these are the things Catherine Breillat does well. So long as she's busting taboos wide open you can forgive her the longueurs, the wilful refusal to attend to fundamental principles of storytelling, her characters' inclination towards such dreary soliloquising you feel like yelling, "For heaven's sake, shut up and get back to the full-frontal fornicating!" At first glance, the story of Bluebeard would appear to be right up her street.This, after all, is the director whose specialities include explicit tumescence and in-your-face childbirth (Romance), rape and murder Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I must admit that I enjoy killing things and, since the target of my murderous instincts are clothes moths, fruit flies and, occasionally, rats or mice, society condones my bloodthirsty instincts. But while I get some satisfaction from my exploits, the women in Paula Rego’s drawings and prints appear to go about their murderous business with a mixture of resignation and detachment. These things have to be done, their world-weary faces seem to say, let’s expedite them with as little fuss as possible.The main difference, though, is that their victims are human; a series of large pastels shows Read more ...
David Nice
The first time I saw David McVicar's production of Strauss's hypersensuous shocker, I gaped in horrified wonder at the Pasolini Salò-style mise en scène but didn't find the action within it fully realised. When it came out on DVD, the close-ups won greater respect but there was still the problem of Nadja Michael's singing, hardly a note in true. Now it returns with Angela Denoke, an even more compelling actress with a far healthier soprano voice.In league with Hartmut Haenchen's pacy conducting she makes you think first, what an incredible score, and only then, what a brilliant production. As Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It occurred to me halfway through Reunited that you could map the characters of This Life – the epochal house-share drama of the Nineties – on to those featured in Mike Bullen’s one-hour pilot feature and see little change in the terrain. All the tropes of modernity 2010-style – Google, Facebook, iPhones – were trotted into shot, but the premise was a dated one, while some of the supposedly edgy, zeitgeisty signifiers – white-painted bare walls, winking references to cocaine – were way off the pace. At least they didn't play any Portishead.Six former tenants of “a shared house in Stokey [ Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Oh, how we like to moan when the inevitably grubby world of Hollywood gets its mitts on one or another European "classic". The Birdcage, we're told, wasn't as good as La Cage aux Folles (actually, I preferred it), and the 2001 Tom Cruise vehicle, Vanilla Sky, isn't a patch on its 1997 Spanish forebear, Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes): I'm with the nay-sayers on that. Now comes the French popular success, Heartbreaker, starring Vanessa Paradis as an ice queen who melts in the hands of a bodyguard who is not in fact what he seems, and word has it that Universal Pictures and Working Title have Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The last time I saw Oscar Wilde’s biblical tale it was performed by dancer Lindsay Kemp at the Roundhouse in London, back in the 1970s, in a production that was high on dope, incense, strange vocal drawling - and which transported you very quickly to hippie heaven. Choked by clouds of fragrant perfume, weird in its singsong language and thrilling in its strangeness, this seemed like an ideal way of realising the crazy vision of this odd piece. But theatre is not about being faithful to fond memories, it’s about the constant restaging of classic plays, so this new version of Wilde’s 1892 play Read more ...
james.woodall
What kind of play is Frank Wedekind's Lulu? The answer is a very odd one, with a fractured writing history. Wedekind subtitled his original five-act exploration of raw femininity, in 1894, "A Monster Tragedy", then divided it into two: Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box. As becomes clear in Headlong Theatre's fresh, winning version of the whole thing, it really is two plays - the first about sexual adventure and rebellion, the second about commerce and corruption; yet staging it over one evening is quite logical, even if its brutal ending is peculiar and resolves nothing (no spoiler here - oh all Read more ...