sex
Tom Birchenough
What exactly do we expect when a drama opens with the declaration, “This is a true story”? The Scandalous Lady W, based on Hallie Rubenhold’s biography Lady Worsley’s Whim, brought us some unusual 18th century marriage shenanigans that ended in one of the most scandalous court cases of the era. But, despite its central legal scenes, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” wasn’t the order of the day.David Eldridge’s screenplay instead adjusted details to strengthen what would have anyway been a very acute commentary on the status of women in society, and particularly within Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Lucky old us. We are now living “in a techno-sexual era”. So claimed this documentary about dating apps which radar-guide you to the nearest available groin. If groins are your thing, that is, and they are by no means everyone’s. We heard about a man who wanted to paint a woman green and “spank you like a big fat avocado”. Another woman was considerably aroused by the sight of a man putting his motor into reverse. We met a puppy fetishist who trusses himself up in leather straps and yaps a lot. This is not to be confused with dogging.The Secret World of Tinder wasn’t really about secrecy at Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This 1887 domestic drama by August Strindberg is rarely seen in London, and Abbey Wright’s new production of Laurie Slade’s new version might have seized the opportunity to give this gristly chunk of pre-Freudian sexual polemic a thorough 21st-century shake-up. That chance is missed.Instead of bracing modernity (the play would have startled its first audiences with its naturalism), we’re presented with a historical hybrid of a world in which the characters wear approximations of fin-de-siècle dress, and the arrival of visitors is heralded by sleighbells, yet a husband may speak of his wife as Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In the beginning was the Word and, not long after, came a need for ritual purification. “When Adam was banished from Eden, he sat in the river that flowed from the garden. Adam immersed in the water, in the very first Mikvah …”.Goyim audience members will be grateful, as I was, for the gloss on this traditional Jewish practice given by one of the characters in the opening minutes of The Mikvah Project, the first full-length play by Josh Azouz, who is currently on the Royal Court’s writers programme. We were more grateful still for his bringing the ballast of comedy to such topics as faith, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Robert Mitchell's second ode to innocence lost is a rather more twisted take on the subject than his first film, The Myth of the American Sleepover. That was a beautifully judged ensemble coming-of-ager which merely teased us with horror tropes. Alongside the titular teen tradition it featured an abandoned warehouse, a Ouija board, a trip down to the basement and a midnight swim. With his chilling follow-up Mitchell goes full horror, presenting us with a STH: a sexually transmitted haunting.It Follows updates Halloween's suburban horror story – where the adults disappear, leaving Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Fifty Shades of Grey is upon us, more or less literally. It's a bit like the clamber-cam POV shot of Jamie Dornan materialising through Dakota Johnson’s spread legs. The teaser campaign has completed its titillating foreplay, and this weekend the fairytale fantasy franchise about fucking and slapping (but please, sir, no fisting) thrusts its entire length into the world’s cinemas. How will it be for you? The morning after, will audiences still be applying Arnica to their assaulted senses?Let’s start with what it’s not. It’s not the worst film in the world. To an extent, it has been rescued Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A New York blizzard so intense that people can't get out the front door traps a random couple who have hooked up online into a rather longer mating dance than they had anticipated. That's the essence of Two Night Stand, the debut film from director Max Nichols (son of the late, great Mike, who died in November) that prolongs a wearyingly cute premise well past breaking-point.That one sticks with the goings-on at all pays credit to the cast of what is essentially a two-hander: the large-eyed Analeigh Tipton and the ever-remarkable Miles Teller, the Whiplash star here cast as a horndog Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With its combination of a Tom Waits lament and visuals tracking over art works by Viennese modernists like Klimt and Schiele, the opening of Nicolas Roeg’s 1980 Bad Timing stays in the memory – its mood remains just there. The territory is defined gradually: variations on obsession, sexual but not exclusively. One line in the script suggests “lineaments of gratified desire”, though the elements of gratification here remain dubious for all concerned.Bad Timing came at the end of Roeg’s glorious 1970s, after Performance, Walkabout and Don’t Look Now. He came on a variation of the script through Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Let's face it, we're all fascinated by orgies. The idea of them gets the blood up. Sex Party Secrets promised a window into this netherworld, advising that such events are increasingly popular, that we're becoming a more liberated nation. At least, the rich are. The documentary's hashtag, #POSH ORGIES, lays down the parameters. This isn't about the world of paunchy, middle-aged suburban wife-swapping but, instead, parties that promise high-end glamour and ecstatic release, as recounted by the organisers, alongside the experiences of attendees.Director James Newton does a great job marshalling Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There is nothing erotic or titillating about The Institute of Sexology, an exhibition the Wellcome Collection plans to keep open for a year. Those expecting a display of fertility symbols, fetish objects, kinky clothing or sex aids down the ages will be deeply disappointed. Just about enough objects and images are included to keep you interested, but the bulk of the show is not dedicated to sexual practices but to the 19th- and 20th-century doctors, anthropologists and psychologists who spent their lives studying sexual behaviour. And therein lies the problem. The exhibition format makes Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A peculiar slice of 19th-century cultural life is mined to minimal effect in Effie Gray, a stillborn labour of love that doesn't justify the long slog from screenwriter and supporting player Emma Thompson required to bring this tale to the screen. It's not just that her husband, Greg Wise, is miscast in a part - that of the visionary critic, educator and sometime-painter John Ruskin - for which he's several decades too old. But the saga of the famously unconsummated marriage between Ruskin and his Scottish wife, Effie, in this telling raises more questions than it answers, and one can imagine Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
At the risk of endorsing national stereotypes, I’ll still describe Yann Gonzalez’ feature debut You and the Night as a very French film. Its appearance in Critics’ Week at Cannes last year brought comparisons with Francois Ozon and Pedro Almodovar for a combination of style and sex, arguably at the expense of substance. And you can’t help feeling that the ghosts – it’s a work very much concerned with ghosts and fantasies – of Cocteau and Genet are lurking somewhere too.Gonzalez’ opening scene, as a woman is driven by a mysterious motorcyclist (pictured, below right) away from a figure she's Read more ...