sex
Kieron Tyler
The release of a restored version of 1974’s Immoral Tales on Blu-ray raises inevitable and unavoidable issues: whether the film is pornography, art or arty pornography. Then, there’s the matter of whether its director Walerian Borowczyk was a misogynist; an objectifier of women. Consideration of its qualities as a film can be lost in such debate.Borowczyk (1923-2006) was working to the directive of his producer, who suggested he make a film to capitalise on France’s newly relaxed censorship laws. This had the added benefit of also, via its nudity and sexual themes, hopefully attracting more Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Action film fans should stay away from this Roman Polanski duet. But those who like their sexual politics served in symbolic form will be delighted. Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner stars as an actress, Vanda, and Polanski-lookalike Mathieu Amalric as the writer-director Thomas.It's not entirely an adaptation of the 1870 novella by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whom the word masochism derives), but a version of the David Ives play about the link between sexual obsession, pleasure and pain. Venus in Fur is like a play: the entire 95 minute duration is set within the confines of a Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Wolverhampton today, tomorrow the world. As unlikely as it was, that was the incentive for aspiring prize-winners in this first of three stories from Channel 4 looking at regional beauty pageants which in turn lead to Miss England and beyond.The events themselves pretend to have moved on from the 1970s when beauty contests were screened live on television, attracting huge audiences in awe at the glamour of it all. Whisper it, but you’re not allowed to call them beauty queens any more. As we saw through the eyes of four young women from the West Midlands, vying to become Miss Black Country, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sex farce, class comedy, crime thriller, existential tragedy, supernatural shocker - Don Giovanni is, as Jonathan Kent notes about his production in the Glyndebourne programme, a cabinet of curiosities. Mozart's music hurdles to and fro across two centuries, the baroque 18th century and the disorientating romantic depths of the 19th; the characters are either stock (Leporello the comic sidekick, Anna the wronged virgin) or so subtle that they need redefining for every staging and every time (Elvira, and the lothario Don Giovanni himself). But again and again, Mozart’s 1787 opera proves itself Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For an artist who famously can't travel to America, Roman Polanski would appear to have an unstoppable passion for filming small-cast Broadway hits. On the back of Death and the Maiden and Carnage, both of which diminished their stage sources, along comes Venus in Fur, adapted from the David Ives play that had no fewer than three separate New York runs, making a star of its husky-voiced young leading lady, Nina Arianda, who won a 2012 Tony for her work.And in that same role as an actress who gives her director considerably more than he bargained for, Emmanuelle Seigner (aka Mrs Polanski) Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As Literary Review's "Bad Sex in Fiction Award" recognises, there's not a lot that's funnier and more damaging to a story's credibility than an attempt to be sexy that falls flat or, even better, that misfires spectacularly. Some of the most famous movie duds - Showgirls, Body of Evidence, Boxing Helena, Colour of Night - which are beloved of course by a certain type of film enthusiast, this reviewer included, strive for smouldering and deliver mainly laughs. Which brings us to the latest example of inept eroticism: In Secret, debut writer-director Charlie Stratton's adaptation of Zola's 19th Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“I’m going to make a porn film with these two,” Charlotte Gainsbourg remembers her Melancholia director Lars von Trier telling the press, indicating her and Kirsten Dunst. Nymphomaniac sounds like that film. In fact it’s another sometimes baggy, sometimes gripping study of a female rebel’s psychological state. Gainsbourg’s Joe (pictured below), is a nymphomaniac, but the erections and penetrations which mark her passage through the world are both fundamental and incidental. Porn is the aspect of sex this film is least interested in.When wide-eyed, monkish Stellan Skarsgård finds a badly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Anybody who has read Rupert Everett's book Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins will be well aware of his fascination with sex and prostitution, so it's no surprise to find him very much in his element as writer and presenter of the two-part Channel 4 series Love for Sale. In part one, showing on Monday 28 April, he goes on a European tour of "sex workers" (though Everett prefers the old-fashioned "prostitutes"), investigating the wildly varying ways and circumstances in which sex is sold. In part two, he steps through the looking glass to meet the clients who pay for the services in question. Read more ...
Naima Khan
When was the last time you took a swipe at someone, and I mean a real swipe - a physical, emotional, cruel, unapologetic swipe of the sort that comes thick and fast in Vicky Jones's exhilarating new play, The One? The three-hander returns the actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge to the site of her solo (and Olivier-nominated) triumph, Fleabag, only this time in a play written by the colleague who directed her last time out.Waller-Bridge's Jo and partner Harry (Rufus Wright, last year's David Cameron in The Audience) met when she was his student and he her lecturer, and they've been living in Read more ...
kate.bassett
We first see the bank clerk, who can’t bear his dull life, serving behind the cashier's till, like an automaton. In Melly Still's hugely inventive, visually stunning multimedia production of From Morning to Midnight – Georg Kaiser's fearlessly weird German Expressionist drama from 1912 – Adam Godley's Clerk starts out as a desiccated nonentity, nose to the grindstone.A huge, ticking clock hangs above him, cogs whirring, bells chiming. Shrill whistles blow as customers whirl in and out through brass turnstiles. Godley remains stiff as a corpse, except for his hands darting out to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
You wait ages for a French film about a teenage girl's sexual awakening and then two come along at once. Actually who am I kidding? As any filmic Francophile will tell you it's not exactly a rarity. Still, red-hot on the heels of the astonishing Blue is the Warmest Colour comes François Ozon's Jeune et Jolie. As sleek and enigmatic as its protagonist, whereas Blue gave us a messy relationship and bodily fluids (including snot), Jeune et Jolie is an altogether cooler, stranger and unfortunately not nearly as credible affair - although it is a lot shorter.Jeune et Jolie is the mercurial Ozon's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sexual intercourse was, famously, invented in 1963. Before that, of course, babies were delivered by beak. So Channel 4’s Sex Season marks the golden jubilee for shaggers. Perhaps there should be bunting and pageantry throughout the land. Instead we’ve got the blank-firing Sex Box and, as of last night, Masters of Sex.The pun in the title is the clumsiest thing about this new Showtime drama exploring the work of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the scientific pioneers in white coats who in the frozen wastes of Fifties America set about researching sexual response. We first meet the Read more ...