Director Pedro Almodóvar and actor Penélope Cruz are a match made in heaven. The pair have been mainstays of Spanish cinema for decades, and their collaborations stretch back to Live Flesh (1997). Along the way, they’ve given audiences classics like All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006) and Broken Embraces (2009). The latest Almodóvar film…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 21 January 2022. The Gods We Can Touch from Aurora is her celestial but provocative new album about shame, desire and morality, all seen through the narrative prism of Greek mythology. In each of the album’s fifteen songs we…
If any setting was just made for Guillermo del Toro, it’s got to be the circus. Colour, spectacle, carnies, creepy clowns, “freaks” – it positively screams for treatment from the modern master of smart horror. But del Toro is mercurial. Just as he turned his hand to big-budget action in Pacific Rim, he pivots in…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 14 January 2022. Punch Brothers’ new album Hell on Church Street is the band’s re-imagining of, and homage to, the late bluegrass great Tony Rice’s landmark solo album Church Street Blues, featuring an inspired collection of songs by Bob…
Simon Kinberg is a hugely experienced screenwriter. He provided the scripts for Mr & Mrs Smith, Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr version) and four movies in the X-Men series. So he knows his way around an action movie. After making his directorial debut with the flop X-Men: Dark Phoenix, he returns to the director’s chair…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 7 January 2022. Flight Facilities’ sophomore full-length LP Forever features the titular single (in collaboration with BROODS), and includes vocal support across the record from Channel Tres, Your Smith, DRAMA, Emma Louise, Jordy Felix and BRUX. Over five years…
The term “fan service” is getting a lot of play right now. The idea is that filmmakers and movie studios owe it to “core” fans to give them what they want. In politics, they call it “playing to the base”. Of course, in this age of social media, just who are the “core” fans often…
If 2020 was a shock to the movie-going system, 2021 was – in many ways – worse. Lockdowns, delays and uncertainty cruelled both the Australian and international film industries. Many studios deferred their biggest releases, hoping for smoother sailing ahead. As a result, it was no coincidence that the two biggest films at the box…
Don’t mess with the classics, they say. But when something has been through as many iterations as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who knows what the definitive “not to be messed with” version is anyway? Even in the film canon, versions of this story go back as far as the early 20th Century. You’ve got Orson Welles’ traditionalist…
West Side Story has a chequered history. The musical by Jerome Robbins (first staged in 1957) met with wide acclaim, as did the 1961 film version directed by Robbins and Robert Wise. But it hasn’t aged well. The depiction of the Puerto Rican characters was always fraught; but the original film’s largely white-washed casting (Rita…
