The Very Picture of Youth.

Ben Barnes (a.k.a. Prince Caspian) goes more than a little Wilde in the bedrooms and backalleys of London in in the teaser for Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray, also with Colin Firth and Rebecca Hall. Looks a bit Red Shoe Diaries, to be honest, but Ms. Hall is always a draw. That being said, why already show Dorian’s doppelganger?

Glaucous Witchcraft.

“But even those who hailed absinthe saw unsettling shadows. Wilde explained: ‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.’” In the NYT, critic Edward Rothstein sings the praises and surveys the notoriety of “the green muse,” absinthe, which is apparently making a legal comeback both here and in the EU. “Absinthe was the premier bohemian drink, as inseparable from the avant-garde of mid-19th-century Paris as was scorn the bourgeoisie. It played the role well; absinthe helped overturn that bourgeois world with seductive visions of another.