Blood Bank is a new Australian play by a new writer Christopher Harley, at the Ensemble Theatre. It was part of the Ensemble Stages 2013 Spring Reading. It is set in the waiting room of a blood bank. Michael is waiting to donate blood to his very ill twin brother Justin, both played, well, by…
A new Australian musical, Bloom hits the right notes. The delivery of effective aged care remains a contentious issue that has brought great consternation to many, before, during and after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Writer Tom Gleisner has taken that and run with it to create a humour-filled portrait of a facility for the third generation in desperate…
Much-buzzed-about band Whitney have released their debut album, Light Upon the Lake, on Secretly Canadian via Inertia. This follows on the heels of recent inescapable single “No Woman” and a notable trip to SXSW. Light Upon the Lake marks the culmination of a short, but incredibly intense, creative period for the band. Whitney was born…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 16 April 2021. Rhiannon Giddens’ new album They’re Calling Me Home was recorded with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi during the COVID-19 lockdown in Ireland. The two expats found themselves drawn to and comforted by the music of their native…
Freelance is a disposable action-comedy from French filmmaker Pierre Morel, best known for putting Liam Neeson through his paces in the thriller Taken in 2008. Freelance stars former wrestler turned actor John Cena as Mason Pettits, a former special forces operative who left the military after a mission in the fictitious South American country of…
The past few months have been a boom time if you’re into European – particularly French – cinema. And that trend continues with the engaging A Difficult Year. I mean, the idea of a comedy about anti-capitalist activism doesn’t sound like a winner, but writer-directors Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano manage to pretty much keep…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 7 May 2021. Ska-punk pioneers The Mighty Mighty BossToneS have released their 11th studio record When God Was Great on Hellcat Records. Co-produced by longtime collaborator Ted Hutt (The Gaslight Anthem, Dropkick Murphys) and Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong (Transplants,…
Okay, this is a tough one. Shirley is out-there cinema for the dedicated cinephile. If you like a nice logical, linear plot with likeable characters, well, I’m afraid this isn’t for you. Director Jennifer Decker crafts an imagined portrait of the acclaimed writer Shirley Jackson that bathes in both the American Gothic that Jackson championed,…
If you want to see basically every space-movie trope collected in one neat package, Neil Burger’s highly derivative Voyagers could be it. This outwardly beautiful but shallow film tries hard, but ultimately falls short. The obvious starting point – as it often tends to be – is Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey. From…
Dour and affecting, The Innocents is a historical drama inspired by little known events that happened in Poland immediately after WWII. It concerns the story of nuns that were raped and thereby shamed by their so-called liberators, the Russians. Many of these God-fearing samaritans were knocked up as a result and they were instructed to…
