Best in Show (2000) was a delightful hoot. Now, nearly a quarter of a century on, we have a beaut family movie that again involves canine and human competition. Runt is a full-hearted Aussie comedy concerning a little girl from a salt-of-the-earth country town and the stray she befriends. Runt – the dog – runs…
The prequel to The Wizard of Oz is back to delight anew and delight it most certainly does in a dazzling display at Melbourne’s finest theatre – the grand Regent. This is top shelf entertainment in every way. I speak of the talent, the choreography, the staging, the lighting and the sound. We are in the…
What a delightful and engaging comedy, which moves along at pace and is entertaining throughout. Tommaso (Marco Giallini) is a respected heart surgeon, although his relationship with the “heart” is limited to the operating room because his hard-nosed manner is hardly endearing to patients, their families or his students. Nevertheless, he is a highly capable…
As an introduction to “Honest I Do,” on this second live album in just 3 years time, blues guitarist Gary Clark Jr. offers this shout out to his influences, “We wouldn’t be doing this thing if there weren’t great artists like Jimmy Reed, Albert King, Freddie King, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, so we’re…
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are a very prolific group. Their latest Flying Microtonal Banana is going to be the first in a series of 4 to 5 albums released this year. Flying Microtonal Banana-if you couldn’t already tell-is the group experimenting with specially built and tuned microtonal instruments, particularly the 24-TET tuning. What’s…
Nostalgia is very much alive and kicking … and Grant Busé has made a thoroughly entertaining, hour-long show about it. He sings, dances, plays instruments (guitar and piano) and chats up a storm. He is funny, clever, risqué and endearing. He pokes fun at the fact that the world seems to be all about remakes, reboots and remixes. He bemoans that “nostalgia just…
Creative – yes. Original – my word. Captivating – not so much. I struggled with Apologia, which is a reflection on language, interpretation and communication across boundaries. It is a piece for selective tastes. Apologia is a bold undertaking and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, I commend courageous theatre. The problem…
The Kitchen Brigade is a modest but generally upbeat French comedy and underdog drama from filmmaker Louis Julien Petit, who has worked as a second unit director on a number of popular and successful Gallic comedies like Welcome To The Sticks. The film centres around Cathy Marie (Audrey Lamy), a sous chef who works in…
Paul Lynch’s 2023 Booker Prize winner Prophet Song is a dark descent into a very possible future. Set in Ireland, Lynch chronicles a worsening situation of a country that descends quickly into fascism and then deteriorates into civil war. At the centre of the action is a family tenuously but ferociously held together by mother…
The artistic links between France and Japan run (perhaps surprisingly) deep. The French Impressionists were obsessed with Japanese woodblock prints, for example. In the 1950s, while French filmmakers and audiences embraced Japanese cinema, with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Gate of Hell (1954) featured at the Cannes Film Festival; while Alain Resnais’ seminal…
