sex
Adam Sweeting
Being a teenager used to be fun, allegedly, but for the young cast of HBO’s controversial new hit series Euphoria it looks more like a nightmare ride through a theme park of bad trips. Filmed in various Los Angeles locations, Euphoria (showing on Sky Atlantic) follows the interconnected stories of a group of teens battling with issues including drugs, sex, gender and family breakdown.Anyone expecting lightweight escapism should look away now. Euphoria pulls no punches in its depiction of drug abuse, and its graphic, brutal sex sequences (episode one even shows an erect penis) have already Read more ...
Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek
Spoiler alert: About sixty-four minutes into our debut feature film, one of the main female characters undresses for the camera. Alicja is being filmed by the other protagonist, a young American documentarian named Katie. As the sexually charged long take progresses, it becomes apparent that what started out as an erotic provocation (catering to Katie’s palpable attraction to her) gradually descends into Alicja’s traumatic memory of sexual abuse. Despite the disturbing situation unfolding in front of her, Katie continues recording, and we – as the audience watching through her lens – become Read more ...
stephen.walsh
One of the features of the converted barn that forms the theatre at Longborough is a trio of statues that tops the front pediment of the building: Wagner, flanked by Verdi on the right and Mozart on the left. No one could question Wagner: Longborough has done him proud. But Verdi, after last year’s dismal La Traviata, and now Mozart, in the dubious light of Martin Constantine’s new Don Giovanni, are looking distinctly uncomfortable as mere attendants at the great Gloucestershire Wagnerfest.I shall struggle to find anything positive to say about Constantine’s Don Giovanni. Set initially – and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A rambling portrait of 24 hours in the life of Double Whammies, an American sports bar where the waitresses entertain their TV-watching patrons by dressing in skimpy tops and tiny shorts. Apparently this is categorised as a ‘breastaurant’ (my spell-checker reels at this portmanteau, but there are several well-established chains in the US). Written and directed by Andrew Bujalski, acclaimed as the godfather of the mumblecore genre after winning praise for Funny Ha Ha back in 2002, Support the Girls works best if you don’t expect too much story development or a lot of fast-paced gags Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
My first, beguiling taste of Hiromi Kawakami’s fiction came when, in 2014, I and my fellow-judges shortlisted Strange Weather in Tokyo for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. That delicate, unsettling tale of a romance between a younger woman and an older man had lost its original title (The Briefcase) for something more obviously offbeat. Allison Markin Powell’s finely-phrased translation appeared a dozen years after the Japanese original. Now, after the acclaim that greeted her version of The Nakano Thrift Shop, Markin Powell returns with another Kawakami work first published in the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Whitesnake were always the most absurdly priapic of the successful Eighties heavy rockers. It was therefore with some glee that this writer approached their 13th studio album. In the snowflake age, where offence is taken at the slightest politically incorrect infraction, these hoary oldsters would surely be a ball. They did, after all, once infamously release an album entitled Slide It In. It turns out, however, that for much of the time, overblown musical cliché is the lasting aftertaste.David Coverdale has led Whitesnake for just over 40 years although, of the rest of the band, only drummer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nicôle Lecky’s one woman show Superhoe has added fire to the reputation of an already fast-rising actress and writer. Based around Sasha, a Plaistow girl who aspires to pop stardom, it’s a clear-eyed, very modern play, filled with its central character’s motor-mouthed bravado and examining the Instagram generation’s relationship with sexual objectification. It comes to the Brighton Festival in May.Raised in London, Lecky, 28, is of mixed British-Jamaican descent. Since training at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts she has gone on to appear in TV shows such as Death on Paradise, Fresh Meat Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The grand finale of Jamie Lloyd’s remarkable Pinter at the Pinter season is this starry production of one of the writer’s greatest – and certainly most personal – works, inspired by his extramarital affair with Joan Bakewell. The 1978 play is famous for its reverse-chronological structure, however Lloyd’s stylish, expressionistic take emphasises the daring not just of the formal trickery, but of the unsparing scrutiny of humanity.Soutra Gilmour’s stark set resembles a gallery, with the tangled trio as its shades-of-grey exhibits; it’s a reminder, too, that these yarn-spinning schemers Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not just the Peter Pan of Pop, but also its very own Houdini. With the aid of shed-loads of money, an illusion-spinning PR machine and the most aggressive lawyers that money could buy, Michael Jackson managed to make it to his premature exit in 2009 without being sent to jail. Dan Reed’s sprawling two-part documentary Leaving Neverland comes to bury Jackson, and to do posthumously what nobody managed to achieve in his lifetime.Reed focuses on the stories of two boys who became, for a time – or perhaps forever, considering the terrible emotional legacy it all left them with – Jackson’s pets. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Have you ever felt the hot shame of saying or doing the wrong thing? Not just embarrassment – that's for amateurs, says Lou Sanders in her wonderfully honest and revealing show Shame Pig, in which she essays some of her life's red-faced moments. Embarrassment is fleeting and lends itself to a good anecdote (or a fine joke in a stand-up set), she says, while shame is a much more corrosive emotion, and one that young women in particular burden themselves with unnecessarily.The show is part stand-up, part performance, as her brief but whip-smart take-off of a TED talk at the top of the hour Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's 18 years since the last Royal Trux album, but it might just as well be 18 months, so easily have they slipped back into their sound. OK, Neil Hegarty and Jennifer Herera have been gigging together again on and off since 2015, but even so it's quite astonishing how natural this record sounds. But then again, the Royal Trux sound was always something that sounded more like a channelling of something elemental than anything composed or contrived.As ever, the fundamentals of sleaze rock are here: lashings of Velvets and 1970s Stones, the “no wave” sound of New York, a little bit of Cramps Read more ...
mark.kidel
Abdellatif Kechiche, the Tunisian-French director, is perhaps best known for the lengthy and explicit sex scenes in La vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Colour). His latest film opens, slam in your face, with a sequence of passionate love-making: well-shot, edited and played by the actors, but almost as raw as porn. We watch, along with Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), the film’s main character, who peers, fascinated through a gap in the blinds.This voyeuristic moment resonates with the filmmaker’s own almost obsessive need to expose without subtlety the details of sexual activity. A kind of voyeurism Read more ...