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Recent reviews

Film  |  Theatre  |  Art  |  Opera  |  Music  |  Television  |  Festivals

Welcome to ABR Arts, home to some of Australia's best arts journalism. We review film, theatre, opera, music, television, art exhibitions – and more. Reviews remain open for one week before being paywalled.

Sign up to ABR Arts and receive longform arts criticism to your inbox every fortnight on Tuesdays. And if you are interested in writing for ABR Arts, tell us about your passions and your expertise.

 

Recent reviews

Catherine Opie: Binding Ties

Heide Museum of Modern Art
by •
11 April 2023
Catherine Opie, Melissa & Lake, Durham, North Carolina 1998 © Catherine Opie (courtesy of Regen Projects and Lehmann Maupin).

As the self-proclaimed home of Australian modernism, Heide Museum of Modern Art is largely known for its exhibitions focusing on the story of the Heide circle and the interactions between Heide founders and patrons John and Sunday Reed and the group of artists, including Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, and Joy Hester (to name but a few), now referred to collectively as the Angry Penguins.

... (read more)

Melbourne Now

National Gallery of Victoria
by •
11 April 2023
Troy Emery, One of the most terrifying prospects here on Earth is that of our planet being struck by a large, massive, fast-moving asteroid or comet 2021 © Troy Emery (photograph by Troy Emery).
Melbourne Now began in 2013 as a massive survey championing contemporary art. Ten years on, the National Gallery of Victoria presents the second iteration. As with many sequels, the intent is to be bigger and better. Melbourne Now 2023 styles itself as an extravaganza, an epic journey into the city’s artistic beating heart. ... (read more)

Membra Jesu Nostri 

Pinchgut Opera
by •
05 April 2023
'Membra Jesu Nostri: Buxtehude’s ‘stairway to heaven’' by Peter Tregear
It was not so long ago that Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707) was best known in classical music circles for the fact that a young J.S. Bach once made a 400-kilometre trek on foot to the North German Hanseatic city of Lübeck to hear him improvise on the organ. ... (read more)

EO 

Hi Gloss Entertainment
by •
05 April 2023
Photograph courtesy of Hi Gloss Entertainment
There is a boldness to veteran Polish writer-director Jerzy Skolimowski’s latest feature EO, which received the 2022 Jury Prize at Cannes, in that its protagonist is not human, has no lines, but is instead a donkey. ... (read more)

Siegfried (★★★ ½) and Götterdämmerung (★★★★★)

Melbourne Opera
by •
05 April 2023
Antoinette Halloran as Brunnhilde (photograph by Robin Halls)
Of all the major operas, Siegfried had the most curious gestation. After completing Act II in 1857, Wagner put it aside for twelve years, ‘as if weary of Siegfried’s progress: this improbable hero’s search for love, fulfilment, individuation’. ... (read more)

Das Rheingold (★★★ ½) and Die Walküre (★★★★★)

Melbourne Opera
by •
27 March 2023
Das Rheingold (photograph by Robin Halls)
One hundred and seventy years after thousands of desperadoes and gold-cravers trekked to a place called Sandhurst, Wagnerites set off to Bendigo on Friday afternoon (in rather more orderly fashion it must be said, along the potholed Calder Freeway) for the opening night of Melbourne Opera’s first full production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. ... (read more)

Broker 

Madman Entertainment
by •
27 March 2023
Lee Ji Eun as So-young (photograph courtesy of Madman)
It’s drizzling when an Aimee Mann song plays in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker. You know the one: ‘Wise Up’, the scabrous number that soundtracks a famous sequence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), whose central cast – united by various machinations of fate – sing along in some kind of deranged processional, each character downcast and seeking salvation in Mann’s lyrics. None appears; the track literally ends with the words ‘give up’. ... (read more)

Into the Woods 

Belvoir St Theatre
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24 March 2023
Tamsin Carroll as the Witch (photograh by Christopher Hayles)
‘Into the woods to get the thing /That makes it worth the journeying.’ Belvoir is luring us into the dark mysterious forest, the setting of so many fairy tales and of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1987 musical, Into the Woods. ... (read more)

Don Quixote 

The Australian Ballet
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17 March 2023
Rudolf Nureyev and Lucette Aldous, 1972 (photograph by Paul Cox)
The opening night of The Australian Ballet’s 2023 season, commencing with Rudolf Nureyev’s unforgettable Don Quixote, was like a joyous homecoming to all sectors of the audience, from rusted-on subscribers to some of Australia’s most gifted ballerinas, and a host of people who quickly absorbed the vitality of Marius Petipa’s 1872 ballet, which Nureyev loved. ... (read more)

Architecture and the new national cultural policy

by •
14 March 2023
Max Dupain, portrait of Walter Gropius with Harry Seidler in Sydney inside the Julian Rose House, Wahroonga NSW
Architects and architectural culture do not slot easily into cultural policy. Those in other creative fields might well say the same, but the ambiguity around the professional and artistic identity of the architect amplifies the problem. Are architects artists? Or ‘creatives’, like those in advertising and marketing? ... (read more)
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