The multi-award winning Marshland was one of the highlights of the recent Spanish Film Festival. This is a rather grim and dark police thriller set in a rural area of Andalucia in the south of Spain. It takes place in 1980, which was a time of great transition for Spain as it moved from the…
After over a decade and 4 full-length studio albums with Best Coast – her band with multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno – Bethany Cosentino has stepped away to create her solo debut, Natural Disaster. Given her previous ventures in power pop/alt rock with excursions into surf rock and country, her solo work here, supported by Nashville producer…
A cavalcade of big Aussie names has lined up to voice a quintessential Aussie animated adventure for the kids. Ryan Kwanten is Blinky Bill, Toni Collette voices a pair of gossipy emus called Sheryl and Beryl, David Wenham is a manic frill-necked lizard and Deborah Mailman Blinky’s kind, sensible mum. Richard Roxburgh has a vocal…
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…
In The Hate U Give, 16 year-old Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) is caught between two worlds. She lives with her African-American family in the ironically named Garden Heights, an impoverished black neighbourhood in Georgia; but she attends Wilmington Prep, a prestigious primarily white school in a more affluent neighbourhood. At school, Starr carefully protects her…
Quite the epic, Little Women – directed by Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) – is a moving adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s award-winning novel. The story unfolds as the author’s alter ego, Jo March (Saoirse Ronan), reflects on her fictional life. It is the tale of four young women – sisters Jo, a writer, Meg…
It is extremely satisfying to see an actor that you’ve observed bouncing around various TV shows over the years finally landing, and nailing, the peak role of his career. Billy Campbell is not a name you’ll twig to straight away until you see his sternly handsome face on the screen and then its ‘oh, THAT…
Growing old isn’t for sissies, they say. Netflix’s excellent series The Kominsky Method proves the axiom; but does it in a remarkably empathetic way. Television legend Chuck Lorre is behind the series. Apart from the behemoth that is The Big Bang Theory, Lorre produced series like Roseanne, Dharma & Greg and Two & a Half…
Contemporary horror/fantasy author Clive Barker’s The History of the Devil focuses on the greatest trial in history. A deprived and lovelorn Satan is tired of living in hell and wants to go back to Heaven, but first he must undergo a trial for his time on Earth. Ambitious lawyers for the prosecution Tiana Varcoe (Lisa…
Heathers – The Musical by Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy, based on the 1990 film, written by Daniel Waters, and starring 16 year old Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, was a complete surprise for me. I had never seen the cult film set in the grossness of 1980’s fashion with all the horrors of American…
