Jonathan Biggins magnificently captures the essence of former Prime Minister and Treasurer Paul Keating in a 90-minute tour de force performance during which you dare not avert your eyes for a second. He is witty, acerbic and insightful as he parades around a maroon coloured set complete with paintings, clocks on the mantelpiece, a banker’s desk…
During my youth I spent many hours next door with the neighbor boy. Not just for having fun or horsing around, but also because in their veranda there was a disused closet with sliding doors where you could always find some old comics lying around. I suppose these were from the older brother who was…
Pete Davidson was a bit of an unknown quality for me. I was aware he was on Saturday Night Live, and I’d seen some of his stand-up – experiences that frankly left me nonplussed. But he’s been in a heap of movies, even if most of them haven’t been released here. His latest acting foray,…
The scourge of opioid addiction is at the core of the dramatic thriller Crisis. A tension-filled opening sees a teenager, Cedric Beauville (Charles Champagne), in deep snow near the US-Canadian border being chased by unseen pursuers. The lad’s capture sets off a chain of events. Jake Kelly (Armie Hammer) is deep undercover. The Drug Enforcement…
Kindertransport is an English play written in 1993, by Diane Samuels. Samuels has written: In early November 1938 an intensive series of ‘pogrom’ attacks on Jewish property and arrests of people were launched in Nazi Germany. This became known as ‘Kristallnacht’, The Night of Broken Glass, and has subsequently been called “pogromnacht’ or Novemberpogrome’. In…
I’ve been a fan of Anne Holt’s Hanne Wilhemsen series for a while. Gripping and tense, her novels keep me awake and turning pages in a restless state of “I need to know what happened”. The only gripe is that English-speaking readers have to wait for translations. Here’s the blurb: Chief Prosecutor Sigurd Halvorsrud’s wife…
Love. Oil. Economic freedom. We come full circle from when oil was first discovered until it runs out in this drama with dystopian elements, appropriately named Oil. We move through five-time frames, from Cornwall in 1889 and Tehran in 1908 to Hampstead in 1970 in the first act, then Baghdad in 2021 and back to…
Call it searching for creativity or a descent into madness. That is a matter of interpretation. Carpet and Sand is a fanciful re-telling of a trip that English theatre and film director Peter Brook took with a group of actors through the Sahara Desert in 1972. Among their number was Helen Mirren. According to the presentation in…
Finally, a sequel I can get behind! Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact Pixar have taken nine years to come up with a sequel to 2015’s Inside Out, but they’ve delivered something pretty special with Inside Out 2. I think the main reason this film works is that it actually makes sense….
Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti (The Son’s Room) has often been compared to Woody Allen, although his films are a lot darker in tone and much more personal in nature. Mia Madre is a quiet, contemplative and introspective film that explores themes of mortality, loss, family, the death of a parent, emotional connections, the clash of…
