New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Francois Ozon.
Cast: Romola Garai, Sam Neill, Lucy Russell, Michael Fassbender, Charlotte Rampling
Description: Grocer's daughter Angel Deverell has always prided herself on her vivid imagination, immortalising her fantastical musings on paper. When publisher Theo responds favourably to her overblown manuscript Lady Urania, Angel rushes to London where, unfathomably, her factually innaccurate book becomes the talk of early 20th century London. She churns out more gushing prose to rapturous public approval, and consequently employs a personal secretary Nora, who worships the ground that Angel trots on. However, for all her literary success and lurid descriptions of enduring love, the authoress is unable to win the heart of the one man she desires: Nora's brother, Esme.
Country: UK/FR/BEL. 2007. 119mins
Belle of the ball: Romola Garai plays a popular novelist who falls on hard times
François Ozon is a Gallic Michael Winterbottom, if not in style then at least in his determination to do something different every time. As with Winterbottom, sometimes the result is great and sometimes not. Here, his attempt to make an English-speaking period piece founders on the unconvincing screenplay he wrote himself and a story that strains credulity.
Adapted from a novel by Elizabeth Taylor, which is a good deal blacker and more ironic than Ozon makes it, Angel is set in Edwardian England and has Romola Garai as a grocer’s daughter who becomes rich and famous for purple-prosed novels that become the sensation of the day. She sets her sights on Michael Fassbender’s radically inclined but unreliable painter, marries him and then finds out he has a mistress and a son elsewhere. He’s only got one leg, too, after volunteering during the First World War.
Her books go out of fashion and there is nothing Angel’s publisher (Sam Neill), who quietly fancies her, and his stern wife (Charlotte Rampling) can do to help her. All she has left is her faithful dogsbody, the painter’s possibly lesbian sister (Lucy Russell).
Capped by an appallingly intrusive musical score but some excellent production design, the film is exactly like the kind of novels Angel writes. Ozon is no fool, so perhaps this is intended. But it doesn’t really help his actors, almost all of whom do well at times to avoid our giggles.
Maybe he should do a Western next. After all, Winterbottom has.
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