sex
Graham Fuller
At 23, Xavier Dolan may not be the new Jean-Luc Godard, but he could be the new Léos Carax. And Laurence Anyways – a tempestuous romantic melodrama spanning the entire 1990s – could be his Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. The third feature made by the Québécois enfant terrible dazzlingly demonstrates his prodigious talent as a metteur-en-scène and director of actors, though, at 168 minutes, it’s about 45 too long.It’s also burdened by narrative cul-de-sacs (not least a clumsy framing device) and peppered with baroque and disco-flavoured visual flourishes that render it stylistically inconsistent. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Magic Mike the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh turns his camera on the “cock-rocking kings of Tampa”, and the result is one of the most eye-wateringly entertaining and surprisingly stylish movies of the year. With more thrust than a jumbo jet and more packages than the Royal Mail will handle this Christmas, thank God they didn’t release it in 3D.Channing Tatum plays Magic Mike, one of the dancers at the Xquisite Strip Club in Tampa, Florida. His colleagues include the extraordinarily monikered Big Dick Richie (True Blood’s man mountain Joe Manganiello), with the club owned and run Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Entirely in keeping with the heightened narrative surrounding pop stars and their perpetual crises, Christina Aguilera’s recent history has been spun into the kind of tragedy worthy of Piaf or Callas. Her last album, Bionic, singularly failed to shift anywhere near the kind of numbers pop divas need to keep a hand on the crown; she had the temerity to put on a few pounds and – worse – seem pretty relaxed about it; she got divorced; she got drunk. Ravens were seen leaving the Tower.These routine potholes in the yellow brick road are rigorously exploited and amplified on Lotus. Aguilera returns Read more ...
james.woodall
With her jewel-blue eyes and intense presence, Emily Blunt can illuminate anything – a screen, a stage, a red carpet, any location for any old interview. She might seem unable to put a foot wrong. With five film credits in 2011 alone (including the DVD under review) and two this year, she’s one of the UK’s most bankable stars, and presumably has a lot of say in exactly what should and should not do.How much did she really want to do Your Sister’s Sister? Originally lined up to play her character Iris’s older sister Hannah was compatriot Rachel Weisz, replaced by Rosemarie DeWitt, who’s Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Considering that his last film was set in a prison, it’s perhaps appropriate to say that Jacques Audiard has an arresting track record. The French director has made a handful of very impressive features (Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped) but it was when he donned a knuckle-duster for his unflinching tale of prison life, A Prophet, that Audiard really knocked many of us sideways. Expectations are then high for the film that follows. Whilst little could match the impact of his previous picture, by taking things down a notch Audiard has delivered something really quite strange and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Do we really needed to hear more from Joe Lampton, the anti-hero of John Braine’s Room at the Top? His battle for social advancement and sexual self-expression has long since stopped holding up a mirror to society, you'd think. In fact we nearly didn’t hear more from him in this new BBC adaptation. Anyone turning on BBC Four one night in April last year expecting to watch would have been disappointed. Owing to a late-blooming rights dispute, the BBC decided on the day of broadcast not to go ahead. Now, 18 months later, with all legal ducks finally in a row, the first episode went out last Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The 1989 production at the Tron in Glasgow of Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman’s translation of Les Belles-Soeurs, the 1965 play by Québécois writer Michel Tremblay, has become a landmark event in Scottish theatre. This new co-production between the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company and the National Theatre of Scotland marks a major and very welcome revival of a work which, although initially written to challenge the prevailing cultural constraints of Canada in the 1960s, retains a real contemporary kick.The themes of The Guid Sisters – economic desperation, the politics of language, religion, the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Kevin Rowland has gone to great lengths recently to ensure that no one is under any misconceptions: the return of Dexys is no nostalgia trip. Last night’s show in Edinburgh hammered home the point. There aren’t many bands that could return after 27 years (give or take a smattering of gigs in 2003), play for two hours straight, perform only four old songs - even if those were stretched out over 45 extraordinary minutes - and yet still satisfy every demand made of them.Before that raucous, rather moving finale, there was the pressing business of performing the new album, One Day I’m Going to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To revive a long-defunct play is dicing with death for a touring theatre company - was the play ahead of its time, or was it not good enough in any time? W Somerset Maugham was a commercial and critical giant in London theatre in the Twenties, but The Sacred Flame - an odd hybrid of whodunnit and (a)morality play - was one that didn’t make it out of its period. But its theme remains unsolved today: the family and medical dilemmas thrown up when a vivid young man is hopelessly crippled, his young wife now unsatisfied, he himself trying to be brave about a position that cripples him Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is a truth less universally acknowledged that a married woman in possession of a rich Victorian husband must be in want of a vibrator.Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Richard Curtis walk into Ann Summers… It’s not the setup for a joke but it is essentially the starting point for Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria – a film the director herself has dubbed “the vibrator movie you can take your mum to”. Wexler gamely takes on the true story of this Victorian medical innovation, folding Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Even Meryl Streep, bless her, is allowed the odd dud, and Hope Springs is a snore. Much has been made of the film shifting Hollywood’s attention toward the middle-aged – meaning, in their terms, anyone 20 or older. But director David Frankel’s reunion with his Devil Wears Prada star merely proves that dogged earnestness can be just as soul-sapping as the latest teenage gross-out venture. One can’t imagine Prada’s Miranda Priestly sitting this one out without a well-aimed mot juste.Perhaps Streep just wanted a complete about-face after the demands of The Iron Lady, the actress turning for Read more ...
james.woodall
Elles promises much. Małgorzata Szumowska, from Poland, is an engaged, serious film maker. 33 Scenes from Life (2008), which won a Locarno special prize, had an edgy, bohemian authenticity to it, and looked with wry east European melancholy at the darker side of real life. It might be thought that Polish edginess and French sharpness combined with beauty – in the form of Juliette Binoche – would be a winning ticket. Yet with Szumowska’s translation to Paris something’s gone wrong.First screened at Toronto last year and then Berlin earlier this, with a star of Binoche’s sureness Elles might Read more ...