As a filmmaking culture, Australia has a lot of people with great ideas. But small budgets and stingy government funding mean sometimes those ideas aren’t fully realised. And sadly, Promised is one of those. Writer-director Nick Condi’s somewhat unconventional family drama is apparently based on a true story, but its heart gets lost in a…
While the recent Yesterday concentrated on the music of The Beatles; Blinded by the Light, focuses on a young man heavily influenced by The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. This one is inspired by fact, which isn’t the case with the other. Set in 1987, during the austere days of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Blinded by the Light…
Three rich, rounded and nuanced performances bring to life a beautiful elegy about love, loss and yearning. The trio of women – in their 20s, 40s and 60s – live in Shetland (an archipelago in the Northern Isles of Scotland). The youngest is Sylvia (Liza Meagher), who married her childhood sweetheart Paul in what was…
A mixture of performance art and theatre, unHOWsed is a laudable and creative look at homelessness from the perspective of eight mature-age women (aged 50 plus to 77) who have been there. It’s a piece open to interpretation, in which a great deal isn’t spelt out. Instead, it is left to the audience to fill…
The new season of The Purge has discarded the ‘endless night’ approach of season one and instead dips into the murk that is the aftermath of the Purge night events. It’s now all about dealing with what you did, what you may have seen and what you may have experienced during the twelve hours of…
Questions of morality and decency are at the heart of an outstanding comedic drama concerning the interactions of two night security guards and two police officers in New York. Jeff (Charles Grounds) was booted out of the navy after three years for dope smoking, something his father – who was a naval hero – was…
With Scrublands we had the bush, with Silver we have the sea. It will be interesting to see if Hammer’s next book is set in a grotty city capital, just to complete the trifecta of the Australian way of living. Silver is set in a coastal town that is struggling to stay relevant and facing…
There is a chill in the air of the Cremorne Theatre as Jane Eyre begins. It’s an affair that befits the terror of Charlotte Bronte’s sophisticated 1847 novel (originally published under the male pseudonym Currer Bell), represented in the stage’s steely blue aesthetic. Not only does it capture the miserable dampness of the northern English…
Prince Hal (Timothee Chalamet) was never destined to become king of England. He was a playboy, drunkard and womaniser, and his tyrannical father Henry VI (Ben Mendelsohn) passed him over in the line of succession for his younger brother Thomas (Dean-Charles Chapman). But England at that time was a land in chaos, divided by years…
A haunted mansion in the middle of suburban Melbourne. Who knew that was a thing in this town? The perfect venue for a creep show where things go bump in the night. It is about broken love and apparitions. There is a back story, given to us by a narrator (Mike Snell) in the hallway…
