sex
Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, British MuseumWednesday, 02 October 2013![]() 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)... Read more... |
The To Do ListMonday, 30 September 2013![]() 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... Read more... |
Kelly + VictorTuesday, 17 September 2013![]() 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... Read more... |
Dates, Channel 4Wednesday, 12 June 2013![]() 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... Read more... |
PARADISE: LoveWednesday, 12 June 2013![]() 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... Read more... |
Limbo, Southbank CentreTuesday, 21 May 2013![]() 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... Read more... |
Gutted, Theatre Royal Stratford EastSaturday, 04 May 2013![]() 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... Read more... |
I'm So ExcitedMonday, 29 April 2013![]() "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... Read more... |
Spring BreakersWednesday, 03 April 2013![]() 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... Read more... |
Post Tenebras LuxMonday, 18 March 2013![]() In Post Tenebras Lux (light after darkness, in Latin) Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas casts a spell which transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The human condition is eye-poppingly explored in this ambitious, sometimes puzzling... Read more... |
The PaperboyWednesday, 13 March 2013![]() You wait years for another interesting Nicole Kidman film and then two come along at once. Two weeks ago it was the elegantly malevolent Stoker and now here's sweaty, shameless noir The Paperboy. It's a film that takes Zac Efron's squeaky clean... Read more... |
Juergen Teller: Woo!, ICAMonday, 04 February 2013![]() Crossover isn’t the half of it. Not since Helmut Newton has a photographer operated so successfully in both the worlds of celebrity high fashion and the world of art. In Juergen Teller’s case there is an emotional warmth that is particularly... Read more... |
