Growing and maturing get a twist in the animated feature Turning Red. Meilin (the voice of Rosalie Chiang) is a very bright and dutiful 13-year-old. She diligently follows her overprotective – and, at times, overbearing – mother’s lead and always does the right thing by her. But one night the totally unexpected happens. Meilin turns…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 11 March 2022. Norwegian musician and novelist Jenny Hval has released her new album Classic Objects on 4AD Records. Classic Objects is a map of places; past places, like the old empty Melbourne pubs Hval’s band used to play…
I couldn’t think of a more appropriate name for a cliche-riddled film that fails to ignite than Off the Rails. When Anna she dies of cancer, she leaves European rail passes for her three good friends to revisit their past adventures. Each of the middle-aged women have their issues. Cassie (Kelly Preston), who plays a…
Although it’s a cliched romantic comedy, Book of Love is not entirely without humour or charm. Henry Copper (Sam Claflin) is an academic turned writer whose debut novel The Sensible Heart is not exactly a page turner, nor has it been flying off the shelves. In fact, when he holds a meet-the-author session, the book…
White privilege receives a pummelling in the satire Admissions. It is 2015 and Sherri Rosen-Mason (Kat Stewart) is head of admissions at an exclusive US high school – Hillcrest in New Hampshire, New England. Over 15 years, Sherri has worked tirelessly to raise the percentage of coloured students at the school. She has succeeded in seeing that proportion…
While it’s only natural to look for echoes of The Smiths in Johnny Marr’s solo work, he was only with that band for 6, albeit, very productive years, and in the decade that followed he cut a wide musical swatch playing in bands as diverse as Modest Mouse, The The, and Electronic, while played guitar…
Pierre Anthon is a massive thorn in the backside of his classmates in year 9. Just one utterance changed their perspective of the world and now they are out to prove him wrong … and they will stop at nothing to do so. Anthon, who we never meet, says “nothing matters” and even as a youngster he…
Liam McIlvanney’s first Duncan McCormack book The Quaker won the 2018 Scottish Crime Book of the Year. In The Heretic McIlvanney brings McCormack back to the mean streets of 1970s Glasgow, six years after the events of The Quaker. So that while this is a sequel and some of the action ties back to The…
Early on in Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Miss Marx, the writer-director makes it clear she considers her subject to be a kind of punk rock icon. Pity then that her film largely shuns that angle and instead meanders into becoming another tepid costume drama. The film ostensibly features a fiery feminist icon, but it plays out as…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 4 March 2022. GRAMMY-nominated saxophonist and composer Melissa Aldana joins Blue Note Records with the release of 12 Stars, her debut album as a leader for the legendary jazz label. At 33, the Brooklyn-based tenor player from Santiago, Chile…
