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
Teenage mother: Katie Jarvis as Mia in Fish Tank. She won the role after a casting assistant approached her as she argued with her boyfriend at Tilbury station
It’s not easy to follow a first film prized at Cannes.
But when it premieres tonight Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold’s second film after the impressive Red Road, will certainly not disgrace this year’s competition, stuffed full of well known auteurs.
Its protagonist is rebellious 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis, in her first acting role of any description).
She lives somewhere on an untended housing estate in Essex with her mother (Kierston Wareing) and her younger sister.
She doesn’t go to school, runs out of the flat when a social worker visits and is not best pleased with her mother’s new man (Michael Fassbender).
What she wants to do is become a rap dancer and softens a bit towards mother’s lover when he gives her a video camera to record a dance she hopes will get her an audition.
Unfortunately, he begins to cleave to her too, with predictable results on her already vulnerable temperament. He guiltily leaves home, and she follows, facing him with a decision he doesn’t like to make.
Fassbender as usual provides a stunning performance of a man who’s left his wife and children, shacked up with the girl’s mother, and then when drunk persuades himself it is OK to have sex with the girl.
Arnold produces a world that’s not without hope but hardly looks as if it promises much in the way of a future for anyone involved.
The film could be accused of being just another dose of British miserablism, and it is clearly too long at over two hours.
But it is well enough written and directed, and certainly acted, to prove a compassionate and in the end and optimistic study of an underclass who, despite everything, refuse to succumb to their circumstances.
All praise too for Katie Jarvis whose performance, considering her inexperience, is astonishing. She is just 17.
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Tonight:
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