love
Graham Fuller
Bernardo Bertolucci was a 23-year-old Marxist intellectual and prizewinning poet with a partner, Adriana Asti, seven years his senior, when he made his lustrous semi-autobiographical second feature, Before the Revolution, in his native Parma in 1963-64. As well as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, Asti, who's still acting, had appeared in the pimp's tale Accattone, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who employed Bertolucci as an assistant director. (Bertolucci made his directorial debut on the 1962 serial-killer drama The Grim Reaper, written by Pasolini and about to be Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Zut alors! A gifted English theatre artist, Emma Rice, comes a serious Gallic cropper with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a stage musical adaptation of the through-sung 1964 movie that only succeeds in making the recent, prematurely departed Love Story look by comparison like Sweeney Todd. Telling a tale of stupefying banality with po-faced ponderousness and little wit, Rice throws at the material all manner of visual fillips and idiosyncrasies, adding in a narrator (Meow Meow's commendably game Maitresse) for good measure. But the danger with making much ado about nothing is that you risk more Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hailed by swarms of critics for its wit, warmth, compassion and daring challenge to conventional notions of gender and matrimony, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right strikes your correspondent as an exhaustingly solipsistic exercise in Californian smugness. The supposedly bold notion of casting two senior Hollywood dames - Annette Bening and Julianne Moore - as lesbian couple Nic and Jules does raise an eyebrow when Moore supposedly pleasures Bening under the bedclothes with a vibrator, while male gay porn plays on the TV.Yet otherwise, Nic'n'Jules's relationships with each other and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Comedian Richard Ayoade’s kinetic, charismatic and accomplished directorial debut follows an introspective adolescent with his feet clamped firmly on dry land but with his head all at sea. In Submarine, our protagonist haplessly negotiates the quagmire of first love, whilst simultaneously dealing with his parents’ romantic disillusionment.An adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s acclaimed novel, Submarine tells the story of Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), an utterly unremarkable 15-year-old living in a Welsh village who is elevated to greatness, albeit only in his own mind. Oliver is a dictionary- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Published in 1987, Norwegian Wood was the novel that turned Haruki Murakami from writer to celebrity in his native Japan. With over 12 million copies sold internationally and a cult of devoted readers waiting fretfully, the notoriously unfilmable book finally makes its screen debut under the direction of Tran Anh Hung. Described by the author simply as “a love story”, this most conventional of Murakami’s narratives picks through the emotional detritus of a teenage suicide, exposing the strands of grief and sexuality that bind our hero Watanabe to the women in his life.“Life is too short to Read more ...
james.woodall
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is apparently a gift for the big screen. It's full of tricks, illusions, two half-humans and of course kicks off with a stonker of a storm: any film-maker might, particularly in this hi-tech epoch, give his or her eye teeth to unleash wildest imaginings on this magical text for grabbiest effect. “The isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not”, says Caliban. Julie Taymor’s new adaptation is full of digital delights, built mainly around Ben Whishaw as Ariel - and, with Helen Mirren as Prospero, it's also responsible for one of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Whether it’s consolation, stimulation, or just some old-fashioned romance you’re after this Valentine’s Day, theartsdesk’s team of writers (with a little help from a certain Bard from Stratford) have got it covered. Exhibitions to stir the heart, music to swell the soul, and comedy to help recover from both – we offer our pick of the most romantic of the arts. So from Giselle to Joe Versus the Volcano, from Barthes to the Bard, theartsdesk celebrates the many-splendoured thing that is love. Judith FlandersValentine’s Day might not seem the ideal day to give your loved one a break-up Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Town narrowly missed out on an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and revisiting it on DVD I reckon it was hard done-by. True, it's possible to pigeonhole it under Heist Thriller, but it's a particularly fine one, and it's much more besides. Displaying multi-hatted expertise as star, director and screenwriter, Ben Affleck (deriving the story from Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves) has rooted his panicky shoot-outs and scorching car chases in a meticulously realised Boston milieu. Specifically, the story centres on the Charlestown district, notorious for its multi-generational Read more ...
Ismene Brown
UPDATE 2015: Four years ago, in January 2011, I wrote this article about the music critic and biographer Michael Kennedy's search for the missing portion of Elgar's life. It identified a Mrs Dora Nelson as the composer's mistress and mother of a lovechild, who might have influenced some legendarily enigmatic aspects of Elgar's compositional output. A new development opened when an Arts Desk reader contacted me, who had taken up Kennedy's and my requests for others to pick up this unsolved mystery. Andrew Baker's work has since identified - unlikely as it may seem - a second Mrs Nelson, who is Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The American indie Blue Valentine was heralded in October by a sexy W magazine cover of its stars - Ryan Gosling smooching Michelle Williams’s temple as she parts her becrimsoned lips and gazes provocatively at us - and the restrictive NC-17 rating (the old “X”) granted it for “its shocking, gory depiction of a dying marriage”. Both cover and rating were wholly misleading publicity fillips for the movie, which isn’t glamorous or gory, or even pornographic: the shots of Williams’s Cindy being taken from behind by one boyfriend and receiving oral sex from another - Gosling’s Dean, with Read more ...
David Nice
Busy, busy, busy tends to have been the watchword of Rudolf Nureyev’s elaborate choreographies. Prokofiev, as the most direct of musical dramatists, demanded streamlining from Sergey Radlov’s complicated scenario in 1935, but Nureyev tends to have jammed extra plotlines back in with un-Shakespearean knobs on. Thank heavens Patricia Ruanne, his Juliet for the initial four-week run back in 1977, and his first Tybalt, Frédéric Jahn, have returned to work so hard on the staging's fiddly bits as to make most of this accomplished revival seem like easy storytelling.Some of it has never served the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s difficult to know how to categorise Love & Other Drugs; is it a rom-com, a biopic, a melodrama, a satire or a hard-hitting attack on the influence that mega pharmaceutical companies have on America’s healthcare system? The film’s makers, meanwhile, tell us in their press notes that it’s an “emotional comedy”. Nope, me neither.I was none the wiser after seeing the film, which premiered at New York's CMJ festival and which stars two of Hollywood’s most intelligent and pleasing-on-the-eye young actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, previously seen as a couple in Brokeback Mountain Read more ...