Although America produced other alternative filmmakers of his generation like Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren, John Cassavetes (1929–89) would have to be considered the doyen of the movement. Directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Peter Bogdanovich, and Pedro Almodóvar have acknowledged his influence. Technically rough though they may sometimes be, Cassavetes’ films have a raw power that, in the words of Amy Taubin, ‘catch you up, turn you around, bore you a little, startle you, and throw you out upset and confused’. Opening Night (1977), a film that was undervalued when it first appeared and is now perhaps somewhat overvalued, is no exception.

I’ve never cared much for first-person direct address monologues in the theatre. Too often, one feels talked at rather than implicated in the action, the interpersonal dynamics of multi-actor drama shorn away in favour of a kind of speechifying.

British playwright Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys – the ampersand seems to be official – is one such monologue. ‘Woman’ (Kelly doesn’t give her a name) is the narrator, a middle-aged PA in the documentary film industry who, having got a ‘drinky, druggy, slaggy phase’ out of her system, marries a handsome antiques dealer she meets at Naples Airport.

Australia’s regional galleries hold rich collections that demonstrate a powerful communal need to collect and display art. Victoria’s regional cities, in particular, are notably well endowed with public art collections and handsome buildings to house them. The gold rush towns were at the forefront in establishing public art galleries: the first, in Ballarat, was founded in 1884; Bendigo followed in 1887. There are now nineteen of them fairly evenly positioned across the state – between one and six hours’ drive from Melbourne – from Warrnambool (1886) in the south-west and Mildura (1956) in the north-west to Bairnsdale (1992) to the east.

Australians might be forgiven for thinking that the history of classical music – as an art form with origins in Europe – is something that happens elsewhere, that we are little more than observers (and listeners) of a tradition that is essentially the property of others. Melbourne-born Percy Grainger (1882–1961), however, presents us with an unambiguous claim to being a classical composer of lasting historical significance. And yet his music is also not performed, or celebrated, here with anything like the frequency and enthusiasm that it is overseas.

Devotees of Giuseppe Verdi often suggest that the composer’s version of Shakespeare’s Othello is ‘greater’ than the original; a fruitless assertion, but indicative of the esteem in which Verdi’s penultimate opera is held. After Aida (1871), Verdi was enjoying the life of a gentleman farmer. Italian opera of the 1870s and 1880s, however, was facing something of a crisis, threatened by the relentless tide of ‘Wagnerism’, whose theories on opera were embraced by many Italians. Verdi, when asked about his own theory of theatre, drily replied: ‘My theory is that the theatre should be full’.

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest feature, Drive My Car, ponders fidelity and sorrow, and the universal truth that people are mostly fucked up. It adapts Huraki Murakami’s short story of the same name from his collection Men Without Women (2014), about a widower recounting his deceased wife’s infidelities to his ‘homely’ female driver. Hamaguchi’s film gently teases out the many quirky strands of information glossed over in the master novelist’s short story, most notably the characters’ backstories. The result is a literary work, magnificent in scope, that unfurls over three entrancing hours.

Vladimir Nabokov, in his exquisite autobiographical work Speak, Memory (1967), says that ‘the prison of time is spherical and without exits’. It is an idea that animates Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home (2006), moving as it does in circular motions, enfolding its characters in an endless orbital spin through the years. Perhaps memory itself is like this, forever returning to our consciousness the painful and joyous things we’d thought we’d left behind, like moons in retrograde. It is no accident that the show’s opening number is titled ‘It All Comes Back’.

A teenager’s arduous journey from a Taliban-occupied Afghanistan in 1989 to the safe haven of Denmark is given a uniquely painterly treatment in Flee. Far from diminishing the story’s impact, this animated documentary is all the more profound for the insidious way the visuals undermine our defences.

Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen became friends with Amin soon after the Afghan refugee arrived in Denmark as an unaccompanied minor. Despite a friendship that has lasted twenty-five years, Amin had never told Jonas the full story of the harrowing experiences that led to his eventual asylum. He hadn’t told anyone. Through the course of Poher Rasmussen’s film, we find out why. 

Richard Wagner’s famous pronouncement, ‘Kinder, schafft Neues!’ (‘Children, create something new!’), has often been the inspiration to take daring creative risks, particularly (but not exclusively) with productions of his works. Using The Ring as a starting point, directorial licence has been extended in all sorts of intriguing ways that have, over the years, seen Valkyries roaring around on motorcycles, Rhinemaidens as strutting Victorian doxies, the dragon Fafner at the turret of an army tank, Wotan as a Texan oligarch, Siegfried as a hippie, and Gunther and the Gibichungs as Nazis.

Since its première in 1949, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman has managed to cling to cultural relevance with a vice-like grip. In 1975, New York Times critic Walter Goodman saw in its evocation of the American middle class the perfect representation of a nation-wide recession following the Vietnam War. In 1984, the play’s titular salesman, Willy Loman, became the symbol of a dwindling middle class under Ronald Reagan. And in Mike Nichol’s 2012 Broadway revival, Charles Isherwood transformed Loman into the perfect everyman for the Great Recession. That same year, Simon Stone staged an innovative adaptation of Miller’s masterpiece for Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre. It was Stone’s decision to have his actors speak in Australian accents rather than the conventional Brooklyn dialect that seemed to pry the play from its American origins.