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,
Andrew O'Hagan's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Christine Jeffs.
Cast: Jason Spevack, Alan Arkin, Eric Christian Olsen, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Amy Adams, Steve Zahn, Clifton Collins Jr, Emily Blunt
Description: Rose Lorkowski is a single mother trying to take care of her impressionable, young son Oscar by working cleaning jobs for little pay while her get-rich-quick salesman father Joe searches for the next big scam and her younger sister Norah is fired from one job after another. Thanks to her married cop lover, Mac, Rose lands some work as a crime scene clean-up technician around Albuquerque, mopping up the blood and bodily fluids after the cops have gone. Norah joins her on the enterprise and in the face of death, the two estranged sister begin to bond.
Country: US. 2009. 91mins
Every year the great, swelling sea of summer movies is supposed to part to reveal a small film with a strong independent character, a movie that will seem, amid all the hype and the spectacular dross, to lead the way to the promised land. The authentic “sleeper” is hard to come by, but when it’s there you will know it by its quirky characters, its nice writing, its downbeat feelgood factor, its success at the Sundance Film Festival, and the way it uncovers fresh potential in a group of interesting actors. Even anti-formula movies have a formula.
It seems to me that Sunshine Cleaning will be the sleeper of this year, a movie soon to be talked about in the same breath as Sideways, Juno and Little Miss Sunshine. The director is Christine Jeffs, who drew poetry out of childhood once before, in Rain, and poetry out of poetry in Sylvia, her biopic of Sylvia Plath.
This time around, at the instigation of brilliant first-time screenwriter Megan Holley, she tells the story of the Lorkowski sisters, who are trying to make their lives work in a smallish American town. The elder, Rose (Amy Adams) is having an affair with her married high school sweetheart, a local police officer, while trying to get her odd son Oscar (Jason Spevack) — he licks furniture — into a private school. Rose’s younger sister Norah (Emily Blunt) is your classic, heavily eye-linered, middle-finger-wielding hardnut who is actually quite soft inside.
They all have issues, needless to say, but the issues are subsumed very naturally into the other stuff that happens in life when you’re not going on about your issues. That means fun and romance, enterprise and absurdity.
What you get with Sunshine Cleaning is all of the above and a little bit more. The film is a small triumph. Rose was once her school’s head cheerleader, but now the years are running away from her: she needs money to help her son and she and Norah find it in an unexpected place, working in crime-scene clean-up. After the police have done their work at the site of suicides, murders, and lonely deaths, the girls go in with their mops and their disinfectant. It probably sounds like an unlikely scenario from which to expect warm humour and terrific insights into the nature of human empathy, but that’s exactly what you get — an object lesson in how to conjure laughter out of the dark.
Adams and Blunt are brilliant together. The older one brings the prettiness and the sparky hunger for life’s big dreams that made her so good in Enchantment. She also brings the sharp instinct for uncertainty that made her the best thing in last year’s Oscar-nominated nun-fest Doubt. Emily Blunt knows how to reveal the shaky foundations of her character’s rebellion: Norah is a bit hopeless, but she cares about her sister and their shared secrets of childhood.
As the film goes on and the laughs build, you feel the closeness of the sisters emerging out of their trials. Alan Arkin plays their dad with a beautiful combination of pride and delusion: he too has his schemes for improvement, and they often fail, but the atmosphere of the movie is so lovely and humane
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
if you are feeling totally fed up with your lot at the moment with the economic squeeze - go see this film.
It is all about the constant knock backs of life and how to keep moving forward.
It will have you laughing out loud one minute and crying the next.
A very bittersweet film.
- Russell, Digswell. Hertfordshire
I was lucky enough to go to a screening of Sunshine Cleaning and I have to tell you this is one of the best films you will see all year. Great performances - you'll laugh, you'll cry, but at the end of it all you will come away feeling much better about the world. A must see!
- Peter Davies, london
Tonight:
9°c
