11 h. ago Love Is Blind: UK Season 2 on Netflix review: let the emotional manipulation begin

Can we find love, ‘sight unseen’? Um, no. But we already knew that

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11 h. ago Love Is Blind UK Season 2 review: let the emotional manipulation begin

Can we find love, ‘sight unseen’? Um, no. But we already knew that

Politics

13 h. ago Love Is Blind: UK Season 2 on Netflix review: vapid, empty, boring

Can we find love, ‘sight unseen’? Um, no. But we already knew that

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14 h. ago Oslo Stories Trilogy: Love review – gracefully grownup and breezy relationships drama

Doctor Marianne wonders if her gay colleague Tor’s approach to dating would work for her, in the second film of Dag Johan Haugerud’s absorbing trilogyHere is the second of Norwegian film-maker and novelist Dag Johan Haugerud’s seductive trilogy about affairs of the heart and mind, set in Oslo. (It comes between Sex and Dreams.) It is a thoroughly grownup and absorbing drama, acted with such sympathy and warmth, a ruminative and exploratory movie of ideas, and one that pays its audience the compliment of treating them as intelligent beings. Love is about a familiar question: can straight people learn from or even absorb the open and polygamous approach to sex that appears to come easier to gay people (and perhaps younger people of all sexualities), perhaps specifically gay men? Or is that idea stereotypical and naive?Andrea Braein Hovig plays Marianne, a urology consultant whose job it is to give bad news to a succession of men about their prostate cancer. She is single (though her p...

Events

4 d. ago Jamie Lee Curtis hits back at Freakier Friday review: ‘Some people love me’

The Oscar-winning star took to social media to defend the new sequel

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4 d. ago Mektoub My Love: Canto Due review – gobsmackingly weird series drops another surreal sex shocker

Locarno film festivalBlue Is the Warmest Colour director Abdellatif Kechiche’s latest erotic melodrama delivers another heady dose of flirting, farce and bafflementSo here it is – the third but, incredibly, perhaps not the final episode in the most bizarre arthouse franchise in film history, and which, for its sheer melodramatic ker-aziness it commands attention. So, as it were, previously on Mektoub My Love The first film in the series from Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche, who had won the Cannes Palme d’Or for Blue Is the Warmest Colour (for which he was famously required to share the award with his two acting leads Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux), arrived in 2017. This first MML (called Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno) turned out to be an epic erotic summer romance set in the early 90s about a guy called Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) who comes back from Paris to his hometown of Sète, having abandoned his medical studies to follow his dream of being a screenwriter, and finds ...

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5 d. ago For Those I Love: Carving the Stone review – bracing anger at Irish social stasis

(September Recordings)The raw grief of David Balfe’s first album may have faded to a bruise, but his spoken-word fury is as strong as ever in these hyper-focused stories of poverty and exploitationOn his 2021 debut as For Those I Love, David Balfe closed the gap between performance poetry, moody 1980s synthpop and sample-stuffed electronica to craft an evocative eulogy for his friend Paul Curran, who died by suicide in 2018. The result was Kae Tempest meets New Order via the densely referential lyrics of Real Lies; a set of songs steeped in lump-in-the-throat nostalgia for more innocent times, and in the muted echoes of dancefloor euphoria.On this follow-up, the Dublin musician – now in his early 30s – adjusts his subject while clinging tightly to his fury and devastation. Aside from The Ox/The Afters, a tribute to a former hardman who dies from drink, there’s not much literal grief on Carving the Stone – but Balfe is still in mourning. His psychic wound is more abstract now, a slow...

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6 d. ago Ethel Cain: Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You review – a dark, Lynchian coming

The American singer-songwriter follows up her 2022 debut ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ with a concept album that’s often mesmerising

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7 d. ago Jin at the O2 review: Worldwide Handsome is keeping the BTS love alive

With a gameshow section and stellar crowd work, Jin turned his solo tour into a love-in for dedicated BTS fans

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7 d. ago 'Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical' review — takes everything we love about the film and makes it even more electrifyin'

'Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical' review — takes everything we love about the film and makes it even more electrifyin'  London Theatre tickets

Culture

last month Men in Love by Irvine Welsh review – the Trainspotting boys grow up

Three decades on from the author’s breakthrough debut, why are we still trapped in the Trainspotting moment?It has been more than 30 years since Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting. To put that in perspective, it’s as distant to readers today as Catch-22 or To Kill a Mockingbird would have been in 1993. If you are anything like me, that doesn’t feel quite right. Because even at such a historical remove, there remains something undeniably resonant, something curiously current, about Welsh’s wiry, demotic, scabrous debut.In part, this is explained by the sheer scale of Trainspotting’s success. It was one of those genuinely rare literary events, wherein a critically acclaimed, stylistically adventurous book catches the cultural zeitgeist to such a degree that it also becomes a commercial sensation, going on to sell over a million copies. Its cultural salience was further compounded by Danny Boyle’s cinematic adaptation, one of the highest-grossing UK films of all time, a visual interv...

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