sensual

The current menu for film and TV stories about cuisine is all conflict and crisis – kitchens as battlefields, dishes forged in the white-hot skillet of raging tempers. But new French film The Taste of Things couldn’t be further from The Bear or Boiling Point. A controlled simmer is more the temperature of this piece by Vietnamese-born director Tran Anh Hung – the most rapturous hymn to culinary art since such beloved gourmet outings as Babette’s Feast or Eat Drink Man Woman.Set in the 1880s, the film – which won Tran the…

Jessy Lanza’s third album, 2020’s All the Time, traded in suggestion. The Canadian producer let fly little wisps of desire – “want / you” – on the breeze of her off-kilter, neon-hued club music in the hope that they might be reciprocated. Love Hallucination changes mode: Lanza is no longer asking but demanding orgasms, devotion and boundaries, sometimes losing herself in the gulf between desire and reality. “So frantic with no purpose,” she sings over the wonky funk of Gossamer, sounding pleasurably lightheaded in pursuit…

For a brief, intense period in the 70s, Glenda Jackson was the very epitome of bohemian Brit chic in the movies: gamine in a worldly English way, intellectual, liberated and frank but with a capacity for demure naivety. This was a period that gloriously co-existed with her recurring appearances on The Morecambe and Wise Show. Jackson revered Eric and Ernie to the end of her life, because apart from their own value, her guest-spots on their programme led to her being cast in the 1973 Hollywood comedy A Touch of Class,…

The broad, coarse leaves of the fig tree provide a layer of protection from the stifling summer heat of rural Tunisia. And likewise, the fig groves offerbrief moments of respite, for the teenagers and young adults who work as fruit pickers, from the conservative restrictions and closed horizons of their village communities.This beguiling, sun-dappled drama is the first feature from French-Tunisian film-maker Erige Sehiri, who cut her teeth in nonfiction and brings a naturalistic, unfettered documentarist’s eye to the…

When Ana de Armas Showcased Her Long, S*xy & Flowy Smooth Back In A Shimmery Gown ( Photo Credit – Instagram ) Ana de Armas happens to be one of the most desirable actresses across the globe. She’s only 34 and is known for delivering some iconic performances in the West with Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Blonde’ being the latest in the list. Today, we bring you a throwback to the time when she dazzled in a blue shimmery gown by Ralph & Russo gown at Golden Globes in 2020 and flaunted her s*xy long back in the one of her…

A second viewing has swept away – with hurricane force – the obtuse worries I had at the Venice film festival about Todd Field’s entirely outrageous, delirious and sensual psychodrama starring Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, the orchestra conductor starting to unravel and unhinge. I had misgivings then about the climactic element of melodrama – which I now see as a deliberate and brilliant stab of dissonance, brilliantly cueing up the film’s deeply mysterious and surreal final section.No one but Blanchett could have…

Books about reading other books are a genre where the act of reading is always, unfailingly, romanticised. Amina Cain’s first foray into nonfiction, A Horse at Night, is no different. Two years ago, she wrote a remarkable novel, Indelicacy, about a cleaner in an art museum wanting to produce art herself. Now she has written a book-length essay where she reads fiction, (and watches cinema, and stares at paintings) not for the value of the stories they tell, but for the landscapes they portray. The essay is a chain of…

Luis Buñuel’s surreal masterpiece from 1972, co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière, is stranger and more sensual than ever. The weirdness under the conventions throbs even more insistently and indiscreetly, now that those conventions themselves are historically distant. We can see with hindsight how Buñuel’s subversion absorbed the various modish forms of agitprop and radical chic, and subverted those as well.The action revolves around some half-a-dozen well-to-do metropolitan sophisticates who are forever attempting to…