Rudyard Kipling’s timeless tales make for engaging family entertainment and are inevitably children’s favourites, whether they be straight animation or animation combined with live action, as is the case here. Bombay-born, English writer Kipling channeled his love of India in 1894’s “The Jungle Book,” following with “The Second Jungle Book” in 1895. Though considered kids’…
Christchurch based author Paul Cleave has had a way of creating scenarios and settings for his novels that have kept this reader awake and mildly anxious for a long time now. Whatever it Takes is a bit of a departure from his previous style, set in the USA, eschewing a lot of the slight paranormal…
Small Town Killers is a jet-black comedy, which pushes the boundaries of taste and fails the political correctness test. But if you’re in the right frame of mind, it’s fun. Ib (Nicolas Bro) and Edward (Ulrich Thomsen) think about sex all the time. But their wives – Gritt (Mia Lyhne) and Ingrid (Lene Maria Christensen) – are…
Every detail was just perfect in the Finnish low-budget indie Euthanizer. From the first second this film intrigued me and managed to hold my full attention. Not only the magnificent acting of Matti Onnismaa and Hannamaija Nikander, as the bitter and sinister person Veijo and the strange figure Lotta whose sexual preference is also rather…
Cartoonist, painter, philosopher: Michael Leunig has plied his trade for decades. He’s become a one-man industry, churning out his offbeat, but highly familiar drawings, artwork and original poetry. Of course, over the distance, he has been interviewed by superior minds like Andrew Denton and Virginia Trioli. Snippets from these interviews are included in this documentary….
“This performance you are about to witness is unofficial, unauthorised and not at all like the 1993 film”, a start-of-show Jurassic Park The Musical announcement declares. Regardless, like its movie muse, the show begins with a mosquito. From there, however, things detour from the specifics of the science-fiction adventure film, to delightful comedic effect. The…
The story of the younger years of an ordinary man, August celebrates the beauty of the small things and the purity of experiences that can be had in living a simple life. A thoughtful novel that seems oddly placed in time, August has much to say about what it is to grow up as a…
Joseph O’Connor fictionalises a true story from World War 2 in the first of a planned trilogy, My Father’s House. The tale revolves around the work of Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty who used his position at the Vatican, a neutral territory within Rome, to help Allied prisoners of war escape. The tale involves the recollections…
Following a whirlwind romance in Monte Carlo, a naïve unnamed young woman (Lily James) is swept off her feet by the handsome and debonair and recently widowed Maxim De Winter (Armie Hammer) and marries him. She is whisked off to Manderley, his imposing ancestral mansion on the windswept English coast. But far from an idyllic…
Dan Auerbach is now at a musical level where everyone takes notice when he is involved with a project. It does not matter if he is producing records from the likes of The Pretenders, Cage The Elephant or Ray LaMontagne, playing in his side band The Arcs or his day job with The Black Keys….
