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Recent reviews
Too often the suburbia on show in American movies feels like a suburbia that only exists in the movies; a fantasy land stocked with preposterously large, catalogue-neat houses populated by families that boast perfect complexions and expensive teeth. Not so in Lady Bird, set in Sacramento, California, where the glitz of Los Angeles and the fashionability of ...
In this fortnight's Update: Picnic at Hanging Rock returns to the Malthouse Theatre, The Lorne Sculpture Biennale, Tognetti, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, The Ones at fortyfivedownstairs, Susan Sarandon at Tropfest, Melbourne Women in Film Festival, Perth Writers' Week, David Stavanger, MTC's new partner, and theatre, music, and film giveaways ...
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Gay theatre, or at least identifiably queer theatre, has never had much of a presence in Australia; most of what we consider canonical has come from overseas. The Elizabethan stage had Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare had two characters named Antonio, in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, who are ...
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Sweet Country, the first conventional feature that Warwick Thornton has made since Samson and Delilah (2009), his début, puts the lie to its title. It opens with a shot of boiling tar and only getting angrier thereon...
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Who knows why, but there have been at least three films in recent months focusing on the Dunkirk evacuation: Lone Scherfig’s Their Finest, Christopher Nolan’s magisterial Dunkirk. and now Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour. Unsurprisingly in view of this, we have also seen a lot of Winston Churchill on our screens ...
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The Post opens with the sounds of whirring helicopter blades over a black screen, before dropping us into the middle of a jungle sortie, circa Vietnam 1966. Caught in the firefight is military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, played by Matthew Rhys. The vicious attack by unseen Viet Cong is staged by the film’s director, Steven Spielberg ...
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Travelling Tales is the third instalment in a series of five concerts, entitled ‘The Usefulness of Art’, by multi-instrumentalist Adam Simmons, all taking place at fortyfivedownstairs. The first, Concerto for Piano and Toy Band, was performed in March this year, and the second, The Usefulness of Art, in August. The final ...
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In this fortnight's Update: Vale Dmitri Hvorostovsky, The Met suspends James Levine, Queensland Theatre’s record-breaking season, LPA Centenary Awards, Terror Nullius, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2017, Fellowships for Indigenous writers at Varuna, Picnic at Hanging Rock at the Barbican, Dark and Dangerous Thoughts at Dark Mofo, and Alexis Wright ...
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Two-thirds of the way through Woody Allen’s new-but-not-really-new film Wonder Wheel, Kate Winslet’s nerve-shot, middle-aged tragic heroine, Ginny, turns to her younger lover, Mickey (Justin Timberlake as a living Ken doll), and says forlornly, ‘Rescue me’. I could not have composed a sadder, more apt summation of the ...
... (read more)In Cahoots: artists collaborate across Country (Fremantle Arts Centre)
The map of In Cahoots is a tracery of journeys made by road and air, like songlines traversing the continent, speaking to points of departure, conjunction, and communion, and to the central theme of the project: communication. Involving six Aboriginal art centres partnered with five individual artists and one ...
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