Polish author Kaja Malanowska wrote her third novel Fog (translated by Bill Johnson) as an experiment in attracting a broader readership through the crime genre. Her previous two novels, the autobiographical Drobne szaleństwa dnia codziennego (Small Madnesses of Everyday Life) in 2010, and Patrz na mnie, Klaro! (Look at Me, Klara!) in 2012 were literary…
In Harry Macqueen’s Supernova, Sam (Colin Firth) is a classical pianist, and his partner Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is a writer. Now middle-aged, the couple have been together for decades. They know how to press each other’s buttons, but are still very much in love. One day they decide to dust off the old camper van…
Raja (Mariya Belkin) and Victor Frankel (Vladimir Friedman), a couple in their 60s, were the unsung heroes of Russian cinema. For several decades they had dubbed Hollywood epics into Russian for cinema audiences. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, the couple left Russia and migrated to Israel. But like thousands of…
Power and control shift constantly in the drama The Cane, which is set in England. On the verge of retirement after 45 years in the job, Edward (Dion Mills) is a deputy school head. It is Sunday and his wife, Maureen (Caroline Lee) – who also used to be a teacher – has been busily preparing for his…
Circa Contemporary Circus has teamed with Aardman Studio to bring to life Shaun, the sheep who has been creating mischief and much mirth with his animal friends since 2007. I haven’t watched the original television series, but I have seen the two Shaun the Sheep movies – the first of which was released in 2015 and…
A whodunnit like you have never seen. That is the domain of three hapless private investigators out to solve a murder mystery. Film noir blended with slapstick, burlesque and circus, Dumtectives is highly creative, very clever, decidedly funny and deliciously rude. Much is performed with a minimum of dialogue, save for a few well worded musical numbers,…
Klara and the Sun is the first novel from Kazuo Ishiguro since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 and his 2015 novel, the Arthurian-inspired The Buried Giant. While delivery a very different main character and sketching in the outlines of a unique future world, Klara and the Sun is thematically consistent with much…
Absolutely marvellous entertainment. A hoot. Heaps of fun. That’s what is in store when you venture upstairs at The Duke of Wellington Hotel in Melbourne to see Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience. For anyone fortunate enough to have seen the 12-episode Fawlty Towers, written by John Cleese and Connie Booth (judged the all-time greatest British television…
It is the 1980s. King Hamlet has died suddenly. A month later, his sister – Claudia – is crowned monarch and the divided kingdom of Elsinore is in upheaval. That is the contention in an immersive theatrical experience at Malthouse Theatre, which draws inspiration from Shakespeare’s explosive Hamlet. We – the audience – are theatrically masked…
If you want to see basically every space-movie trope collected in one neat package, Neil Burger’s highly derivative Voyagers could be it. This outwardly beautiful but shallow film tries hard, but ultimately falls short. The obvious starting point – as it often tends to be – is Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey. From…
