sex
emma.simmonds
As a director François Ozon perpetually confounds, with a string of diverse films to his name (the intense 5X2 and the gambolling Potiche to name but two) and this effort from 2002 is characteristically capricious - is it crisp, contemplative drama, eroticism or thriller? In Swimming Pool former provocateur Charlotte Rampling finds her peace shattered, her sensuality re-awakened and her robust beauty upstaged by the brazen Ludivine Sagnier.Swimming Pool tells the story of artistically frustrated crime writer Sarah (Rampling) who retreats to France at the behest of her greedy publisher and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having begun as a piece of fan fiction derived from the Twilight movie series, EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey has blown up into the publishing phenomenon du jour. It's supposedly the UK's fastest-selling book of all time, and has sold nearly 50 million copies worldwide. In the process, with its copious descriptions of BDSM (or bondage, discipline and sado-masochism), it has gathered a vast mostly-female fanbase and fostered the creation of the term "mummy porn".It has also become a giant canvas for pundits, fans, critics and "experts" of every hue to spray graffiti on, a fact which this Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sound the trumpets triumphantly - Matthew Bourne’s most original masterpiece has come out of hiding into full view, a giddy, sexy, diabolical confection that hovers on the edge of hellish, and deserves to become a global smash. Play Without Words is everything that any sex comedy could aspire to, everything that a film noir could aim for, and much more dangerous than either theatre or film can be, because it’s what bodies do, not what mouths say, that is leading you into your own sinful nature.Bourne made the work in a National Theatre workshop 10 years ago, and that experimental milieu drew Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Massive commercial success usually buys an actor the right to bring a pet project to fruition. The Artist had not yet conquered the planet when The Players was cooked up. But its release in the UK – simultaneously in cinemas and on DVD, which says it all – is of note mainly because it features Jean Dujardin. Teamed with Gilles Lellouche, the two stubbly middle-aged roués explore the corridors and back passages of playing away, French style.The film’s original title is less euphemistic: Les infidèles is an adultery palimpsest whose original French poster (pictured right) caused a storm in a PC Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Having spent the last few years alternating deftly between high-profile, star-studded blockbusters (the Ocean’s trilogy, last year’s Contagion) and smaller, more niche projects starring largely unknowns (Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience), Steven Soderbergh may have found his perfect middle ground. Male stripping dramedy Magic Mike pairs big names (Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey) with near-unknowns; it combines trashy visual pleasures with shrewd, straightforward character writing; it was made on a $7 million shoestring, and has already become a box office hit in the US. It is something Read more ...
Joe Muggs
A few of the things that are made to seem intensely erotic in this film: glue, bread, nails, carp, a satchel, a lift door, the death of a hen, the postal service, and in one particularly discombobulating scene, giant multi-headed shaving brushes. The Czech director Jan Švankmajer's allegiances couldn't be clearer: in the credits, he references Sacher-Masoch, de Sade, Freud, Buñuel, Max Ernst and 1930s Czech surrealist, psychoanalyst and author of Autosexualismus a Psycherotismus, Bohuslav Brouk. The almost-silent movie Conspirators of Pleasure (or, to give it its original title, Spiklenci Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bloopy Seventies synths. Glitter Band drums. The fuzz guitar of Sweet’s “Blockbuster”. Eighties electro-robot-pop. New wave chug. The hot dog streets of West Bromwich. Morning TV. Bailiffs at the door, The secularisation of institutions and the decline of civic pride. Mickie Most and his plastic pop. These then, are amongst the contents of the new tablet handed down by former Felt leader, perennial underdog and über-cult figure Lawrence. Bizarre and enjoyable, it’s disquieting too. “Hello, I’m Lawrence and I’m taking over” he declares colourlessly.A series of close-typed, dense paragraphs Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“A dirty fairy tale” was one of the encomiums lobbed at The Apartment in June 1960, nine months before it won Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Wilder the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Although The Saturday Review’s influential Hollis Alpert was critically off the mark when he disparaged Wilder’s serious adult comedy, he was right to describe it as a fairy tale. A prince does rescue a princess after an ogre’s cruel treatment of her has caused her to fall into a fatal sleep.The “dirty” part is more complex. The premise is undeniably Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Ooh look, she’s at it again. Fresh from hurling insults at David Starkey (well, he started it) and provoking the ire of historian Alison Light - who presumably didn’t make it through BBC casting - for daring to try on a bonnet on the box and thus “cheapening history”, Dr Lucy Worsley is back on our screens, doing ninja kicks in Puritan dress, trying Restoration gowns for size and shamelessly discussing Samuel Pepys’s “emissions”.Worsley, who is Chief Curator at the Historic Royal Palaces, is one of a number of increasingly visible female academics (see also Amanda Vickery, Bettany Hughes and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Chocolat, a film about chocolate addiction, was extremely sweet. Trainspotting, a film about drug addiction, was wired and hip. Shame, a film about sex addiction, assaults you with wave upon wave of tristesse.When Sarah Kent reviewed the theatrical release for theartsdesk, she found in it a stereotypical joyride secretly in love with the thing it deplores. Those aren’t the colours this male reviewer takes away from the fractured relationship between sex addict Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a pump-action Adonis running on emptiness, and his sister Sissy, a brittle, wandering chanteuse (Carey Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Who knew back in 1999 that a comedy about a bunch of teenage boys desperate to lose their virginity before they graduated from high school would be so popular? Adam Herz's script for American Pie, filmed by debutant directors Chris and Paul Weitz, was a huge box-office hit, and spawned two sequels; American Pie 2 (2001), American Wedding (2003), and now a third - American Pie: Reunion. There were also four spin-off straight-to-DVD films. Perhaps most notably, it presaged the perils of sex and the internet and brought the term “milf” to worldwide attention.The title famously refers to a scene Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From the moment the first series came eyepoppingly to the boil, the loyal fanbase of Lip Service began clamouring for a second helping. That was back in November 2010. Eighteen months later, their wish has finally been granted, and audiences are once more free to plunge headlong into the world of the Glaswegian L Word. Some things are reassuringly very much as you were. Two characters were down to their smalls within a minute of the start, while the Friday-night bar scene is still a low-lit den of drugs, booze and casual same-sex nods, winks and frots. This remains in-your-face entertainment Read more ...