Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) is back with a breathtakingly beautiful film about childhood, loss and memory. Petite Maman (which translates to Little Mummy) focuses on an eight-year-old girl’s relationship with her mother. Nelly (Josephine Sanz) has just lost her grandmother. She and her mum Marion (Nina Meurisse) and father (Stéphanie Varupenne)…
The consummate stylist of the American cinema is back and in top form. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is another excellent entry in the director’s canon and is probably his most accessible work since Rushmore. As I’ve said in these (digital) pages before, Anderson is a love-him-or-hate-him proposition. If you’re in the “hate-him” camp, you can…
In a word, stunning. That is my take on Disney’s latest and greatest show on ice yet. Officially named Disney on Ice: Road Trip Adventures, it’s slick and spectacular, and features a collection of Disney favourites. First up, there is a warmup from Patrick and Taylor (who turn out to be Mickey and Minnie Mouse,…
A searing look at female homelessness in Australia over the age of 55, Way, written and performed by Sally McKenzie, is as powerful theatre as it is shocking reality. In short, it is distressing but important to watch what unfolds. McKenzie – an MTC stalwart in the early 1980s who moved back to Melbourne from Brisbane as…
I was promised something different with Underground Opera and I certainly got it. It was a stunning evening of entertainment from a talented group in an amazing venue. To sit under the brick archways six metres underground in a space that, 150 years ago was filled to the brim with the water that supplied the…
This re-imagined production of Peter Schaffer’s Tony Award winning drama about the fictional rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri is being staged as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations for the Sydney Opera House. Classical music and opera are incorporated into Schaffer’s drama. Snippets of Mozart’s famous compositions and his operas, such as…
In the present fetid political climate, maybe, overheated by the media in its rush to find ‘villains’ and ‘victims’, to entertain our appetites for the moral humiliation of others, with the official exposure and investigation of child abuse in Australian schools and institutions, Melvyn Morrow’s new play, VICE – Private School Scandal, attempts to bring…
A man who lived the kind of life he wanted inspires the feel-good Hampstead. The setting for the film is breathtaking. Hampstead in London is famous for its beautiful and much-loved heath – a piece of quiet countryside in a vast metropolis. Living on the edge of the heath is American widow Emily Walters (Diane Keaton). Since her…
Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter is an atmospheric horror movie based on a chapter from Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic novel Dracula. It concerns the terrifying story of the merchant ship Demeter, chartered to carry private cargo – 50 unmarked wooden crates – from Carpathia to London. Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham) has already decided this will…
Memory. The tricks of memory. I have recollections of what I believe to be ‘turning points’/’defining moments’ in my life and each time I replay them, either, mentally or verbally, both in speech and writing, they subtly change – more or less. If that ‘point’/’moment’ was between two of us, or more, each of us…
