sex
Jasper Rees
Sex in a box, in a nutshell. That was the concept. Not literally in a nutshell, as that might have been difficult. But a big white cuboid thing in a studio. Designed – this is an educated guess - by Ikea, being tacky and easily assembled. Couples enter the box and, with luck, each other, and then come and talk about it, in front of a panel of sexperts. What could possibly, in the United Kingdom of embarrassment and irony, go even slightly wrong?The foreplay was bang on the button. Mariella, the one with the blonde streaks and succulent larynx, telling us exactly what she was going to do to us Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week Channel 4 embarks on a season of programmes about sex. Real sex, it claims, in real British bedrooms. A new series called Masters of Sex dramatises the story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who from 1957 pioneered research into sexual response. And then there is Sex Box, in which couples will perform the eponymous activity in the eponymous container and then come out and discuss it in front of Mariella Frostrup and a live audience. Would such a thing have been imaginable without Shere Hite?To hyperbolise only a little, Shere Hite is generally credited with the discovery of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The new puritanism of the American cinema continues apace with Thanks For Sharing, which follows on from the more elegantly made but comparably dispiriting Shame in positing Manhattan as the most sexually dysfunctional place on earth. What did New York do (besides elect Michael Bloomberg as mayor three times over) to deserve all this carnal angst and obsessiveness and shame? Lord knows, but even the wonderful Mark Ruffalo can't lift the spirits of a film that wallows in its therapy-speak environs. One doubts audiences will be sharing this one once word of mouth kicks in.Ruffalo plays Adam, a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sex please, we are Japanese. This astonishing collection of about 170 paintings, prints and illustrated books from 300 years of Japanese art, known as “shunga” or spring pictures, come in part from the culture of the “floating world” (ukiyo-e) mostly located in Edo (modern-day Tokyo), from the mid 17th- to mid-19th centuries. But shunga go beyond the world of paid-for pleasure, of courtesans and actors, of that world of pleasure that was allowed, as so many other worlds weren’t in the strict and hierarchical society of Japan. (Ordinary people were not allowed to participate for example Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In this refreshingly rowdy, distinctly feminist film from debut writer-director Maggie Carey an inexperienced, tirelessly sensible teenage girl prepares herself for college life by taking charge of her own sexual awakening. She does so in a way that's hilariously overly administrative, with her plans taking the form of the title's tawdry, quite literal "to do list".Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza is gifted the role of Brandy Klark, school valedictorian and virgin. As the film opens, the year is 1993 and Brandy's sights are set on college and little else. That changes when she's conned Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Kieran Evans’s debut feature, adapted from the novel by Niall Griffiths, achieves a rare and accomplished sense of place in its depiction of Liverpool. It’s a place of chilly but not actually threatening cityscapes, with an air of space and windy sunshine, from which the film’s eponymous protagonists retreat into a private bedroom world.Kelly (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) and Victor (Julian Morris) catch each other’s eye across the dance floor, and they’re soon spiralling into a relationship. It's gradually revealed that she’s been hurt in the past, and has ended up with a very particular way of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The idea of writing nine 30-minute dramas (or more like 26 minutes when you take the ads out) about the thrills and calamities of first-dating might have been asking for trouble, but seems to be working out unexpectedly well so far. The crafty part about the concept (dreamed up by Bryan Skins Elsley) is that instead of having to explain the setup and establish the characters' relationships, you just watch two strangers starting the process from scratch, so they're doing the job for you.After a persuasive start on Monday with David and Mia, starring Oona Chaplin and Will Mellor, the ante edged Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The likelihood of leaving a screening of PARADISE: Love without feeling either queasy or at least a little off balance is low. This realist-styled portrayal of middle-aged Teresa’s excursion to Kenya to seek intimacy and, inevitably, sex is awkward viewing. Some scenes are so uncomfortable to watch that their imprint will be permanent. PARADISE: Love is made all the more an assault on perceptions of acceptability by being entirely unjudgemental. Reactions are entirely up to the viewer. Director Ulrich Seidl offers no helping hand.Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) is Austrian. She’s 50, a single Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Circus is a broad church these days. It can be housed on the street, a grand proscenium stage and all points in between. For this latest incendiary reinvention of the form, it makes its way back into an intimate big top where the residual DNA of circus’s regular trappings seem all to be in situ. There’s bendiness and balancing, aerobatics and good old trapezing, fire-eating (pictured below) and sword-swallowing. But before you book for the whole family, be aware that the whole shebang is underpinned by something you never used to get at Billy Smart's: lashings - and I mean lashings - of sex. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rikki Beadle-Blair is a high-energy polymath. He’s a real phenomenon. Raised by his lesbian mum in sarf London, he wrote his first play at the age of seven and was, he claims, already directing four years later. Nowadays he creates challenging entertainment in film, education and theatre (18 new plays in six years). He also writes self-help books. His heart’s clearly in the right place. There’s only one problem — he’s not a very good playwright.Gutted, his latest trip down to the council estates of South-East London, is a family drama. It’s a grim tale of an Irish cockney matriarch, Bridie, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"What makes you think all this is funny?" businessman Ricardo Galán (Guillermo Toledo) snaps after a particular high-spirited episode in Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's latest, and it's undoubtedly a remark that will resonate with some members of the audience. Almodóvar is one of modern cinema's finest auteurs - a director for whom we reserve the highest of expectations. However his latest is camper and more booze-fuelled than Christmas, coming after the comparably tortured The Skin I Live In and Broken Embraces this is the cinematic equivalent of a blowout.So yes, this is one very silly Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Whilst Zac Efron is getting urinated on in The Paperboy, his High School Musical co-star Vanessa Hudgens is taking the piss in an entirely different sense. In Spring Breakers Hudgens and Disney princess Selena Gomez bin their clean-cut images to hook up with James Franco's metal-mouthed miscreant during the US rites-of-passage party season. Harmony Korine's fifth feature gives us girls in bikinis packing heat. It revels in the fuck-you-I-won't-do-what-you-tell-me of it all and it's hard not to be seduced by its glamorously anarchic brand of entertainment.Spring Breakers follows four college Read more ...