In a cinema environment overcrowded with remakes, reboots, sequels and superhero movies, it’s a pleasant surprise to come across something that’s as unique and genuinely entertaining and as hard to define as Polite Society. This energetic and colourful hybrid of Bollywood films, fantasy, high school comedy, rom-com, martial arts drama and action-thriller has been compared…
Talk about throwing the kitchen sink at a movie – it appears the filmmakers behind Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 have pulled together every cockamamie idea they could think of and left it there on screen for the world to see. The heart of the story is a familial relationship concerning a megalomaniacal father,…
What does it mean to be Australian … to live in this country? What expectations do you have of others’ behaviour towards you … and what is the harsh reality? Who is exploiting who? Who is taking advantage and how significant is the social, class, gender, racial and cultural divide? These are some of the…
Australian author Hannah Kent burst on to the scene with her multi-award winning debut Burial Rites, a historical novel set in Iceland. She followed that up with a very different historical piece – The Good People, set in Ireland. In her third novel, Devotion, Kent comes closer to home, basing her story on the immigration…
A striking reimagining of Shakespeare’s tale of murder and madness, Zinnie Harris approaches the tragedy from Lady Macbeth’s perspective. Macbeth’s wife is the one pulling the strings … or so she thinks. For those familiar with Macbeth, the basic plot remains … with twists. Scottish general Macbeth receives a prophecy from three witches that he…
Caroll Spinney is an octogenarian puppeteer. He is also a talented artist and the man who has been behind Sesame Street’s Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since the TV show’s first season. It premiered in the US on November 10, 1969 and is still running today. This documentary captures how the warmth radiating from…
Bullying and racism are not acceptable in any environment and yet the schoolyard can be a hotbed of discontent. So it is for 15-year-old Lucy Lam (Ngoc Phan), the daughter of hard working parents who emigrated from Vietnam. She is the recipient of the inaugural Equal Access Scholarship to a prestigious private school, where wealth is flaunted. It…
Leaves is a play by Irish writer, Lucy Caldwell, written in 2007, as part of a residency at the National Theatre Studio. A family is waiting for the return of their eldest daughter, Lori (Harriet Gordon-Anderson), from a recovery clinic after an attempted suicide. Her two younger siblings, Clover (Bobbie-Jean Henning) and Poppy (Poppy Lynch)…
The second installment in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 sci-fi novel picks up where Dune (2021) left off. In this chapter, the exiled Duke of House Atreides, Paul (Timothy Chalamet) establishes himself as a leader. You may remember that in Part One, basically the whole House Atreides was massacred by the evil…
What is always surprising about cults is that they consistently manage to attract seemingly intelligent people who leave their ordered lives to join bizarre communities run by petty tyrants with delusions of grandeur. What is sadly not surprising is that at the centre of cults there are often innocents, the children. There’s a few plot…
