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
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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: Michael Winterbottom.
Cast: Colin Firth, Perla Haney-Jardine, Willa Holland, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis
Description: Mary is directly responsible for the death of her mother Mary-Ann in a car accident on icy roads and finds it difficult to cope, suffering terrible nightmares, which cause her to scream in the dead of night, waking her father Joe and older sister Kelly. Hoping for a fresh start, the family moves temporarily to Genova where Joe has accepted a year's teaching post, reuniting him with old colleague Barbara. While Kelly enjoys the freedom of Italy, flirting with a number of local boys and testing her father's patience by staying out late, Mary remains aloof, glimpsing what could be the ghost of her dead mother. Tensions within the family come to a head during an ill-fated visit to the seaside.
Country: UK. 2008. 93mins
Love and loss: Colin Firth plays a widower trying to start a new life in Italy
Sometimes the slightest storyline produces more truth than the strongest plotting. Not a lot happens in Michael Winterbottom’s family drama but he skilfully provides what detail there is and leaves the viewer to supply the rest.
Colin Firth plays Joe, an English academic who has lost his much-loved American wife (Hope Davis) in a car accident. He seeks a fresh start by moving with his two daughters, aged 10 and 16, to Genova in Italy and taking up a post at the university.
The elder daughter (Willa Holland) begins to explore her sexuality with willing Italian boys, while the younger (Perla Haney-Jardine) is traumatised by the belief that she caused the accident and is certain she can still speak to her mother. Joe just about copes with the kids, helped out by an old friend (Catherine Keener) and his students, who respond well to him.
Winterbottom looks at Genova with the same sort of imaginative eye that Nic Roeg looked at Venice in Don’t Look Now, only without the sex. There’s nothing flashy, only the often present feeling that the change of lifestyle could provoke disaster.
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Whether it is the elder sister weaving her way through the traffic on her Italian boyfriend’s scooter or the younger girl lighting a candle for her mother at church and wandering off without telling her father, there is a palpable sense that something awful might happen.
At the end of the film when nothing terrible has transpired, there is a sense that it is somehow incomplete. But this is a much more intimately reflective drama than Winterbottom usually supplies, and it tells us a lot about loss in a dozen small ways. The cast, particularly the children, do the director proud.
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