Thirty years on and boy-band (now very much man-band) Human Nature has still got it! On stage for more than two hours, performing a set of 30 plus numbers, these guys – brothers Andrew and Michael Tierney, together with high school friends Toby Allen and Phil Burton – are energetic and reverential. They love their…
Jim Cummings gives a bravura performance as a man on the edge in Thunder Road. This offbeat drama concerns a small-town US police officer who suffers a breakdown after the death of his mother. Cummings wrote and directed the piece, and appears in almost every scene. It’s based on his short film of the same…
The unerring passage of time as death nears is the subject of Wakey, Wakey. In it, an everyday man contemplates what has gone before. He is Guy, a role filled by Justin Hosking who has a delightful demeanour. The first lines say it all: “Is it now? I thought I had more time. Wow. That…
La Traviata Stripped and Dressed in Jazz and Blues is classic opera shortened and mashed with contemporary music. It’s operatic numbers interspersed with popular modern tunes … a fusion of the two. It is quite a heady mix and one pursued passionately by Emotionworks Cut Opera and specifically its creative force, Julie Edwardson. She’s a…
Gloria Bell is a deliberately awkward film about the difficulties of making your way in the world. Especially if you’re a divorced middle-aged woman yearning for something more. Julianne Moore embraces the title role in yet another stellar performance. She finds Gloria’s vulnerability and, conversely, her strength and resilience. Gloria is a free-spirited divorcée who…
Fleur Kilpatrick’s stage adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five explores the horrors of war and the effects of PTSD. The play centres on the Allies’ firebombing of Dresden between February 13 and 15, 1945 in which tens of thousands of people died. The book’s narrator (and author), who’s also part of the play, has…
A throwback to a time of homophobia, paranoia and fear, 1985 is a heartfelt realist tale. Having been gone for three years, closeted advertising executive Adrian (Cory Michael Smith) returns to his Texas hometown for the Christmas holidays. As the title suggests, it’s 1985, during the first wave of the AIDS crisis. Burdened with an…
Who would have thought that infrastructure could be made into a compelling movie? The Hummingbird Project deals with the idea that saving a millisecond can make hundreds of millions of dollars. Cousins from New York, Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton Zaleski (Alexander Skarsgård) are players in the high-stakes game of High Frequency Trading, where winning…
Things go bump in the night in the horror-thriller The Curse of the Weeping Woman. It’s the first feature film from director Michael Chaves. James Wan – one of the producers – made an art form out of exploiting the horror genre; specifically the Annabelle franchise. The Curse of the Weeping Woman references the spooky…
The Trouble with You is an absurdist French comedy that’s both clever and silly. I didn’t know whether to delight in its eccentricities or howl at its stupidity, so I flipped from one to the other and back again. Let’s be clear on one thing – the plot is ridiculous. Detective Yvonne Santi (Adèle Haenel)…
