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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

Sick of Myself 

Static Vision
by
02 October 2023
Over the course of the past five years, the Norwegian-born, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli has acted in many of the films he has directed, more often than not playing a thinly veiled version of himself. In shorts such as A Place We Call Reality (2018), The Loser (2019), and Willem Dafoe (2023) – all available online – Borgli portrays, respectively: a director who has lost his way; an interviewer who cannot think of any questions to ask his idol; and an artist who cannot remember a famous actor’s name. ... (read more)

My Sister Jill 

Melbourne Theatre Company
by
02 October 2023
Some of Australia’s most enduring plays have dealt with war and its legacy. Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year (1960), John Romeril’s The Floating World (1974), Dorothy Hewitt’s The Man from Muckinupin (1979), Kate Mulvaney’s The Seed (2008), and Tom Wright’s Black Diggers (2015) have, each in their own way, interrogated the baptisms of blood upon which much of our national mythology, our national identity, has been built. ... (read more)

Shayda 

Madman Entertainment
by
26 September 2023

Sometimes, through no deliberate strategy on the creators’ part, a film taps the Zeitgeist and takes off. Writer-director Noora Niasari’s début feature, Shayda, a very personal film that explores the courage and resilience of an Iranian woman escaping domestic violence in Melbourne, was already in post-production in September 2022 when the women-led uprising erupted in Iran, after the killing of Mahsa Amini by the morality police known officially as the Guidance Patrol.

... (read more)

Das Rheingold 

Royal Opera House
by
25 September 2023

Wagnerians are like elephants: they never forget. Though the Royal Opera House may have become less conscientious about printing performance histories in its handsome red-covered programs, for many the memories of past Ring cycles at Covent Garden live on. That may not always be a healthy thing – there are of course few more necrophiliac artforms than opera – but it’s impossible to view the opening of Barrie Kosky’s new Ring in isolation.

... (read more)

Biographica 

Lyric Opera
by
25 September 2023

Biographica, an opera in twelve scenes for one actor, five singers, and eleven musicians, was premièred to considerable acclaim by Sydney Chamber Opera at Carriageworks as part of the 2017 Sydney Festival. The creative team of composer Mary Finsterer and librettist Tom Wright subsequently had another success there with Antarctica as part of the Sydney Festival 2023; Finsterer and Wright can now be considered two of the most important creative voices working in Australian opera today.

... (read more)

La Chimera 

Italian Film Festival
by
19 September 2023

La Chimera is the fourth feature film from Italian director and screenwriter Alice Rohrwacher, who made her feature film début in 2011 with Corpo Celeste (Heavenly Body). It is the final piece of a triptych – including Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) (2014) and Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro) (2018) – which poses, in Rohrwacher’s own words, the central question of what to do with the past.

... (read more)

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill 

Belvoir St Theatre
by
18 September 2023

What makes the physical and mental disintegration of famous performers so compulsively fascinating to so many people? The breakdown of a talented artist, usually female, brought down by her insecurities and the betrayal and abandonment of those close to her, usually male, is a trope that is endlessly trotted out to and repeatedly lapped up by audiences.

... (read more)

Maria Stuarda 

Melbourne Opera
by
15 September 2023

The fecundity of Gaetano Donizetti in the 1830s – when he was in his thirties – was exceptional, even during those rampant years for Italian opera. His successes were frequent: Anna Bolena (1830), L’elisir d’amore (1832), Lucrezia Borgia (1833), Maria Stuarda (1834), and Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), perhaps his finest achievement. Donizetti, who wrote about seventy operas in all before his mental collapse in 1846, was the nimblest of composers. Between L’elisir and Lucrezia, for instance, came four operas, all rarities today.

... (read more)

A Haunting in Venice 

Twentieth Century
by
12 September 2023

In 1920, the figure of Hercule Poirot arrived, fully formed – from the top of his egg-shaped head to the tip of his toes – when Agatha Christie published her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. She introduced her detective in the words of an admiring narrator who was to function as a kind of Dr Watson to her Great Detective. Poirot, we are told ‘was an extraordinary looking little man, hardly more than five feet four inches, but he carried himself with great dignity’.

... (read more)

The Chairs 

Red Line Productions
by
11 September 2023

The French-Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco’s ambivalent attitude towards the power, even the usefulness, of language played out throughout his career. Speaking of Jean-Paul Sartre, Ionesco (1909–94) said that he ‘wrote an important book called Words and there he noticed that he had talked too much all his life. That words are not saying anything.’ Later, Ionesco claimed ‘[w]ords no longer demonstrate anything. Words just chatter. Words are escapism. Words prevent the utterance of silence.’

... (read more)