Emily St John Mandel came to prominence with her fourth book, the pandemic post-apocalypse Station Eleven. That book gained a second wind when the COVID pandemic hit, and was turned into an HBO series. Some of the craziness of that success, and of the pandemic itself, is captured in St John Mandel’s latest book Sea…
Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) is back with a breathtakingly beautiful film about childhood, loss and memory. Petite Maman (which translates to Little Mummy) focuses on an eight-year-old girl’s relationship with her mother. Nelly (Josephine Sanz) has just lost her grandmother. She and her mum Marion (Nina Meurisse) and father (Stéphanie Varupenne)…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 6 May 2022. Headful of Sugar follows New York-based trio Sunflower Bean navigating the agony and ecstasy of contemporary American life. “Tomorrow is not promised, no tour is promised, no popularity is promised, no health or money is promised,”…
If Shakespeare had the vision of Nostradamus, he may well have foreseen The Merry Wives of Windsor being set in a 1980s Australian backyard. Nonetheless, director Viktor Kalka has made the geographic transition and it is an interesting concept, to say the least. Inspired by “The Bard’s” intention to make the play contemporaneous, Kalka creates one…
Soprano Stacey Alleaume is almost ethereal in a scintillating performance as Violetta Valery in Giuseppe Verdi’s fraught, emotion-charged, love story La Traviata (which translates to The Fallen Woman). Her pure voice reaches remarkable highs as she dominates the stage in a bravura showing. Violetta is a Parisian courtesan and the life of every party. Recently returned from…
Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife* is a story of hardship and resilience. This magnificently shot film follows a woman living in the Australian bush trying her best to raise four young children. Purcell plays Molly Johnson, a woman living in the Snowy Mountains in 1893. Molly’s husband – as the title suggests – is a…
Those with long memories might recall the consternation back in the early 2000s when storied horror director Sam Raimi – of Evil Dead fame – was tapped to direct Marvel’s Spider-Man (2002). Of course, it all turned out fine. After three Spider-Man movies, Raimi returned in a more limited way to his horror roots. Now…
(watch my moves), the ninth studio album from Kurt Vile if you include his collaboration with Courtney Barnett on 2017’s Lotta Sea Lice, finds the folk/rock singer-songwriter guitarist in now familiar territory. A traditionally laid-back creator of jangly guitar rock, Vile used some of the pandemic shutdown to build a home studio, OKV Central, which…
Set during the Great Depression, Girl from the North Country is a brilliantly conceived and executed theatrical production, featuring the music and lyrics of Bob Dylan. Irish writer and director Conor McPherson has taken the singer songwriter’s life’s work and reimagined it as an expansive Eugene O’Neill* type play with music. At its core is the realism…
A. Lee Martinez specialises in a kind of fantasy comedy that riffs on a range of fantasy, science fiction literary and movie tropes. His 2013 novel Emperor Mollusk Versus The Sinister Brain centred around a super villain, and the book before that 2012’s Chasing the Moon was a comic hero’s journey fighting a range of…
