Patricia Maunder

Patricia Maunder has been a media professional for more than twenty-five years, covering travel, lifestyle, and the arts in print, online, and radio. She has extensive experience as an arts critic, particularly theatre, opera, books, and film, including for Australian Book Review, Limelight, and ArtsHub. Based in Melbourne, she lived in Montreal in 2012–16, and is the author of a travel guidebook for that city to be published by Hardie Grant in April 2019. www.patriciamaunder.com

If Beale Street Could Talk

ABR Arts • 08 February 2019

There is an inordinate weight of expectation on Barry Jenkins’s third feature, If Beale Street Could Talk. His previous film, Moonlight, won three Oscars in 2018, including Best Picture (after La La Land’s mistaken-award chaos), and was nominated in five other categories. Furthermore, this is the first English-language film adaptation of a work by celebrated African-American writer James Baldw ... (read more)

On the Basis of Sex

ABR Arts • 04 February 2019

Recent years have highlighted the politicisation of appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States, and how consequential these judgeships can be. Following the death in 2016 of arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, in his final months as US president, nominated moderate Merrick Garland, whom the Republican-controlled Senate refused to confirm. Newly elected President Do ... (read more)