Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 12 June 2020. Muzz is the new project of Paul Banks (Interpol), Josh Kaufman (producer/multi-instrumentalist and one third of Bonny Light Horseman), and Matt Barrick (drummer of Jonathan Fire*Eater, The Walkmen, and Fleet Foxes’ touring band). The trio have…
What an amusing movie The Banker was. It’s the kind of movie you start watching and before you know it, the end credits roll across your screen. Even though the subject won’t get you very excited. The world of real estate and banking. A world populated with stiffs in perfectly fitting suits who prefer to…
In essence a chase novel, Shepherd is also a confidently pitched work about something just a little different. There’s not a lot written that is set in this time, being the settler years of Australia, so that alone is something of a literary hook and grab for a young reader to pick up this book….
You get the sense listening to the fifth album from Perfume Genius, aka Mike Hadreas, that at heart he’s a torch singer. Whatever the musical direction or production style an individual track takes – and he does just about everything here, from dirge-y electronica to buoyant faux-50’s dancefloor pop, maudlin grungy rock, and of course…
As I’ve said in these pages before, I’m a sucker for a good spy story. And, let’s face it, no one does spy stories quite as well as the master, Jon Le Carre. The Little Drummer Girl uses Le Carre’s novel of the same name as its basis, and this limited series delivers simply excellent…
Adapted from the bestselling novel by American author Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere was another swift and savvy snap up by Hello Sunshine, the media production company owned and founded by actor/producer Reece Witherspoon. Ng’s fictional drama of motherhood, social expectations and economic divides was optioned for TV even before it hit the bookstores in…
Australians who grew up during the era in which Riptides is set may recognize a heck of a lot of their own experiences; the long road trips on rubbish roads, the relentless heat, Bali (even as it was back then), perhaps even turning on the TV at Christmas time to news of the devastation wrought…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 5 June 2020. Singer and pianist Kandace Springs — whose soulful singing led her late mentor Prince to praise her “voice that can melt snow” — has debuted her newest project, The Women Who Raised Me, on Blue Note…
Australian science fiction and thriller author Max Barry goes the full Heinlein in his latest book Providence. Providence is military science fiction with a take no prisoners attitude. It takes readers into an ongoing war with an alien race but also questions whether humanity is really up to the task. The book opens with humanity’s…
Unlike a lot of filmmakers, Steven Soderbergh seems quite content being part of the streaming revolution. Alongside The Laundromat, the director booked another film for Netflix. High Flying Bird is rather more subdued than The Laundromat, but it shares some of that film’s DNA. Both are concerned with corporate power; and although the earlier release…
