Smile is a genuinely scary and engaging psychological horror movie. It centres around a hard-working therapist in an emergency psychiatric unit, named Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon). As Dr Cotter is about to leave the facility after a particularly long shift, a young graduate student Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) enters shaking and clearly traumatised. In…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 30 September 2022. A thunderstorm of a return is what the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have in store for 2022, with the release of Cool It Down, their first new music since 2013’s Mosquito. Their fifth studio album is an…
A secret imaginary rendezvous between two towering but polar opposite African American leaders plays out in The Meeting. The pair lived in the same era. Both were assassinated at age 39. One preached non-violence, the other violent rebellion. I speak of Baptist minister and activist Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) and Muslim…
Cyrano is a massive triumph. The MTC production of the season. A talented cast, headlined by writer and star Virginia Gay prove that the pen is mightier than the sword. This is a contemporary rewrite of the classic play by Edmond Rostand about a French army soldier and gifted poet with a particularly large nose enamoured…
An engaging professor of parapsychology talks us through the history of ghost stories – how they came to be and how they have evolved over time. Phillip Goodman’s (Steve Rodgers) dissertation comes complete with photographic and video “evidence”. Among the most compelling is a photo of four people taken in Scotland in 1972, which, upon closer inspection,…
Do you love the theatre? How about whodunnits? If you said yes to either, then Tom George’s star-studded See How They Run is likely to be your cup of tea. This frothy mystery has its problems, but still manages to tick a lot of boxes. The script by Mark Chappell is crammed full with theatrical…
The Humans is an adaptation of the 2016 Tony award winning drama written by Tony award winning playwright Stephen Karam. The film reworks many of the familiar tropes of the dysfunctional family gathering sub-genre – a favourite theme of many productions, such as Tracy Letts’ August Osage County. Karam makes his feature film directorial debut…
With the release of their third studio outing, Expert in a Dying Field, power-pop/indie rock quartet The Beths are three for three. In 2018, Future Me Hates Me found vocalist/songwriter Elizabeth Stokes delivering powerful melodies, big power-pop guitars, and delightful vocal harmonies from the boys in the band, a debut that inserted itself high on…
The second line of Peter Allen’s iconic anthem I Still Call Australia Home contains the words “From New York to Rio and old London Town”. It then goes on to say, “I still call Australia home”. Only Rio doesn’t feature in The Australia Ballet’s three parter Instruments of Dance. The triple bill has the works of resident…
Anthony Marra takes on Hollywood during the Second World War and much more in his latest novel Mercury Pictures Presents. The book delivers a broad cast of characters, each given a chance to shine, and visits some of the lesser known stories to come out of the War. The book opens in 1941, Mercury Studios…
