Fifty years ago, The Exorcist rewrote the rule book. It was the first horror film nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. The loosely connected The Exorcist: Believer starts in colourful style in Haiti. Pregnant Sorenne Fielding (Tracey Graves) and her photographer husband Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) are on holiday. Then, all hell breaks loose….
Just why Deborah Conway and her husband Willy Zygier are cherished as Australian music royalty is evident when you see Songs from the Book of Life. It is an 80-minute narrative concert featuring a cavalcade of life experiences, as outlined by Conway, along with eight songs. She goes back to her childhood when her parents used…
The sci-fi adventure The Creator questions whether artificial intelligence is the big bad bogey or not. A war is raging between humans and robots possessing artificial intelligence. But, at first, it’s not clear which side is wearing the black hats and which the white. Joshua (John David Washington) is an American special forces soldier operating…
Their father was big and strong. He could be fun, but more often than not he was scary, angry, brutal and dogmatic. He couldn’t land a job and so money was always tight. He drank. After surviving WWII, which included being shipwrecked and a prisoner of war on the Thai-Burma Railway, he had PTSD. His wife,…
There’s barely a moment’s let-up in the tense, action thriller Retribution. Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) has worked as a financier for Nanite Capital for 18 years under its CEO Anders Muller (Matthew Modine). Work drives Turner. He and his family live in luxury in Berlin and he drives a luxury car. He has little time…
For those not in the know, Paw Patrol is a Canadian computer-animated children’s TV series that has been running on Nickelodeon for a decade. The show focuses on a 10-year-old boy named Ryder who leads a crew of search and rescue dogs in Adventure City that call themselves the PAW Patrol. A feature film called…
Justin Williams makes the impossible possible with a big smile on his face. He is an illusionist and balloon artist who recently won the Australian reality TV series Blow Up. That saw 10 people competing to create the best balloon artworks. He has parlayed that success into the world premiere of Justin’s BIG Balloon Show, in which he…
Stunning. That word best sums up The Australian Ballet’s reinvention of Anne Woolliams’ acclaimed 1977 production of the world’s most famous ballet, Swan Lake. The tragically beautiful story with instantly recognisable score remains an audience favourite and the centrepiece and shining light of many companies’ repertoire. Swan Lake is magnificent, majestic and mesmerising. Dancer, ballet mistress, teacher,…
How clever and creative. Circa’s Carnival of the Animals is an engaging, endearing, comedic and delightful family show – circus with a decided difference. When we enter the Playhouse at Arts Centre Melbourne, in the middle of a barren stage is a small stack of old-style suitcases of various sizes. As the show starts, these “props” are…
Turning Agatha Christie murder mysteries into popular cinema is proving quite lucrative. So it’s not surprising that for the third time Kenneth Branagh has teamed with writer Michael Green to adapt Christie’s late (1969) novel Hallowe’en Party for A Haunting in Venice. The unsettling supernatural thriller follows the success of Murder on the Orient Express…
