sex
josh.spero
I hadn't thought this one through very well. As someone who was put off horror films by a window crashing onto a hand in one of the Amityville movies at least two decades ago, watching Time Shift: Dear Censor last night, which promised to show some of cinema's most notorious scenes, was probably unwise. Happily, standards of gore, violence and sex have dropped so fast in the past 20 years that what was censorable in 1991 is PG now.A compact history of the British Board of Film Censorship (it became the less finger-wagging Classification in 1984), made with extensive access to its letters Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Saul Rubinek is an established actor in American television programmes such as LA Law and Frasier, where he played Daphne's fiancé Donny. Now the Canadian has turned his hand to playwriting and the result – Terrible Advice – receives its world premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London.Rubinek subtitles his work “A Dark, Dirty and Dangerous Play” and there are certainly nods to the first two elements, but its dangerousness rather escapes me. It concerns the story of two middle-aged men, now living in what is presumably Los Angeles, who met at college; child-man Jake (Scott Bakula, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I'm going to help you rediscover your manhood," a self-described sexual "tomcat" called Jacob (Ryan Gosling) tells his new friend, and project, Cal (Steve Carell). And with that, the awkwardly titled Crazy, Stupid, Love sets off on its none too surefooted way. Might some equivalent to Jacob's confidence and expertise have been of use behind the camera, as well? Without a doubt, and one worries only that there may be those who actually do take this film as some sort of sexual and social primer for our troubled age.On the other hand, no movie with Gosling's singular charisma and insouciance Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A time-tested formula gets tantalisingly tweaked in Friends with Benefits, in which Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis attempt to confine their relationship to the purely sexual without the ick factor of emotions getting in the way. Here's a Hollywood film confident enough to poke fun at Hollywood conventions - take that, Katherine Heigl! Kunis lets cry at one point - while following a not hugely dissimilar path. The difference is that this one benefits from actually being sparky and entertaining. Can you imagine that?In fact, it's not hard to guess at the good will generated by the two leads, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Cinematic virtuoso Pedro Almodóvar’s contribution to the body horror subgenre is a sumptuous nightmare with the precision and looming malevolence of its psychotic surgeon’s blade. His 19th feature is a film for our age – an age which has seen radical and sometimes grotesque surgical reinvention - concerned as it is with the troubling question: what actually lies beneath?Based fairly loosely on the novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In reunites Almodóvar with his former leading man of choice, Antonio Banderas. Banderas plays Robert Ledgard, a cutting-edge (excuse the pun), Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Glyndebourne’s production of Benjamin Britten’s terrifying The Turn of the Screw is one that really does turn the screw tightly in the mind. It pierces time with its updating from its original Victorian setting to a bleak Fifties Britain, it tightens the tension with its wintry, claustrophic setting, and it delivers its questions into our suspicious, information-saturated modern heads with added twists. Given a magnificent musical and dramatic ensemble to interpret it in this revival, it's an evocative way for Glyndebourne to end this tense, unpredictable summer, art gnawing away at the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mid-August Lunch (2009) was the most purely enjoyable of the welcome new wave of Italian films. Watching its writer-director Gianni Di Gregorio, then 59, star as a failed Roman rogue with a lived-in face, swigging wine while failing to corral his irascible mother (movie debutante Valeria de Franciscis Bandoni, 93) and her ancient cronies, this was la dolce vita lived amiably on the bottom rung. In a summer of lazy remakes and sequels, this odd couple’s swift return in Salt of Life is a delight.This isn’t strictly a sequel but, as when Chaplin would bring back the Tramp, another variation on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I Resign. It’s not a phrase you hear that often these days. Unlike, obviously, You’re Fired. There was a time, largely synonymous with the era when Tory toffs and grandees had sufficient private income to walk away from employment, that a chap could afford to resign, as the phrase has it, with honour. And it usually was a chap, usually after he’d been found to be hopping on and off strippers or tarts or his secretary or handing over the Falklands to some jumped-up tinpot little Johnny Foreigner. Nowadays politicians prefer to wriggle on a spit and keep the chauffeur. Honour be damned, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is there a place for the travelling fun fair any more? Static attractions like Alton Towers and Thorpe Park have rides that are bigger, grander, more varied and scarier than anything a traditional, transient fair could ever transport. All the Fun of the Fair’s answer was that the fair has survived by winding the clock back, rekindling the past with original Victorian and Edwardian rides. There’s still room for something less bombastic.All the Fun of the Fair traced the history of the travelling fair in its familiar form. What we now recognise as the fair, with rides, sideshows and snacks Read more ...
Ismene Brown
An obsession with sex and death underlies many of the immortal works of 19th-century classical ballet. Giselle is seduced, La Sylphide does the seducing, the Sleeping Beauty is awakened by sex, the Swan Queen is an apparition of death to Prince Siegfried who is easily waylaid by her doppelgänger, Odile of the 32 fouettées. Roland Petit brought it all out in the open with his ballets in the next century. As one observer said in 1949 of the premiere in London of his ballet Carmen, you could see the men’s trouser buttons popping.In the three of his famous works on parade last night at the London Read more ...
Graham Fuller
What would loving Gilda Farrell be like? I do mean Gilda, and not Rita Hayworth, who was 27 when she portrayed her. The flamboyantly seductive persona Gilda has adopted to drive men crazy obscures the true nature of a woman who learns it brings out the worst in them and that it's a heavy burden to carry. As the actress ruefully remarked of her husbands, “They all married Gilda, but they woke up with me” - a telling putdown of the erotic artifice in which she herself was draped. The “clothed” striptease Gilda electrifyingly performs in Charles Vidor’s perverse and sophisticated film Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Wage-slave purgatory in three different flavours is the subject of Seth Gordon's comedy, as his trio of downtrodden leads decide that the only way to break free from remorseless professional abuse is by murdering their respective bosses. George Cukor this ain't - in fact, Gordon has succeeded in making Carry On up the Khyber look like a revered art-house masterpiece - but as long as you leave your brain in "Park", there are just enough laughs to drag you to the closing credits.Jason Bateman plays Nick, a dogged corporate yes man at Comnidine Industries who deludes himself that his boss VP Read more ...