Nine may not be a conventional musical, but it still has great power. It’s the story of a self-obsessed film director and writer, Guido Contini. Guido is about to turn 40, and his last three movies have been flops. He’s signed on to make a new picture, but has no idea what he’s going to…
Co-written by Marie Drucker and director Stephane Brize, Out of Season is a sensitive, slow-moving romance. Mathieu (Guillaume Canet) is a famous Parisian movie star, married to a prime-time news anchor. Four weeks before making his stage debut, Mathieu gets cold feet and pulls out, leaving everyone in the lurch. While he knows his withdrawal…
Katy Massey draws on her own family history as the basis for her downbeat and gritty debut crime novel All Us Sinners. The book is set in Leeds, in the North of England, in the late 1970s, during the reign of terror of the killer who came to be known and The Yorkshire Ripper, All…
Aftermath is the story of a tragic plane crash between two commercial airliners. As a result there are 271 lives lost. Among them the wife and pregnant daughter of the Russian foreman Roman (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Don’t expect staggering images of the accident with explosive footage and anxiously screaming passengers. The only image you’ll see of the…
COVID-19 has provided plenty of rich fodder for comedians Judith Lucy and Denise Scott. They take to the stage in presumably faux fur as is befitting two “living legends”, after a video montage announcing their arrival. Post exchanging some pleasantries and put downs with a few audience members, they turn the past two years into Comedy Central….
Eccentric Danish auteur Lars Von Trier makes controversial and deliberately confronting films. His latest is likely to be divisive as well. Despite the title, The House That Jack Built is not a family-friendly fairy tale. Rather this is Von Trier’s portrait of a sadistic serial killer. But the film isn’t as illuminating nor as insightful…
Patricia Highsmith is a name familiar to many movie buffs. Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr Ripley and The Two Faces of January are just a few of the films based on her writing. Of course, these fall into the mystery-thriller genre, but Highsmith’s writing was broader than that. In Carol, director Todd Haynes…
Writer and director Alex Garland (Ex Machina) is a master filmmaker who steps it up a notch with the blockbuster Civil War. In the film, America is at war with itself. The President (Nick Offerman) has declared he is on the verge of victory, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Looking to take…
Luke Rogers, director of the new Australian play In Real Life, began a collaboration with writer Julian Larnach almost three years ago. In the program notes, Mr Rogers uses a quote from Sherry Turkle, a Professor of Science and Technology: ‘Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we…
Skyscraper is essentially a cross between Die Hard (the best action film of the 80s), and The Towering Inferno (the best of the 70s disaster films). This is a big dumb action film, and no-one is better at making big dumb action blockbusters than the charismatic Dwayne Johnson; arguably the biggest movie star on the…
