Trailblazing indigenous artist and outspoken provocateur Richard Bell is arguably one of our most important artists whose work has been exhibited internationally. But he is also confrontational and unapologetic in his opinions about Australia’s treatment of its First Nations people, and he also bemoans the fact that traditional Aboriginal art work and paintings have now…
My Old School is a quirky and unusual documentary constructed from a mix of archival footage, interviews and animation. In 1993 17-year-old Brandon Lee enrolled as a student at Bearsden Academy in Glasgow. He was a popular student even though his appearance was a bit odd. He claimed that his unusual looks were due to…
This re-imagined production of Peter Schaffer’s Tony Award winning drama about the fictional rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri is being staged as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations for the Sydney Opera House. Classical music and opera are incorporated into Schaffer’s drama. Snippets of Mozart’s famous compositions and his operas, such as…
Filmmaker Guy Ritchie gathers together most of his usual band of players for Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. And this action-packed but cliched globe-trotting spy movie ticks all the right boxes for the genre. When a mysterious device (the film’s MacGuffin) is stolen from a secret laboratory MI6 needs to act quickly to recover it…
Hollywood has a habit of remaking popular European films, rather than merely releasing the subtitled original and thus broadening the audiences’ horizons and cultural experience. The latest film to undergo the bland Hollywood treatment is the 2015 Swedish comedy/drama A Man Called Ove, which was the highest grossing foreign language film for 2016 in the…
In 2012 amateur historian Phillipa Langley discovered the final resting place of famed fifteenth century monarch King Richard III under a carpark in the centre of Leicester. Most of what contemporary audiences know of Richard, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, is based on the play written by Shakespeare some 100 years after the king…
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Inspired by actual events Margrete: Queen of the North is an epic historical drama from Denmark set in the early 1400s. The film is a drama of Shakespearean proportions with lots of court intrigue, betrayals and treachery. Queen Margrete (Trine Dyrholm) has managed to unite Norway, Denmark…
The bleak melodrama The Road Dance is set against the backdrop of a tight-knit crofting community on the storm-lashed island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in 1916. It’s based on the bestselling 2002 novel of the same name written by Sky TV journalist John MacKay, and the events of the book were supposedly inspired…
In Violent Night, the wealthy Lightstone family gather at their secure remote family compound to celebrate Christmas. But this is a dysfunctional family as everyone tries to suck up to Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo), the family matriarch to curry favour and remain in her good graces. Jason (Alex Hassell) is separated from his wife Linda (Alex…
Seriously Red is a cautionary tale about obsession, fandom, and discovering who you are. This Australian jukebox musical draws from the songbook of iconic singer Dolly Parton, and in style and look is something of a throwback to the 90s. The film is the brainchild of star and writer Krew Boylan (from TV series A…
