This laboured, overlong comedy inverts the premise behind What Women Want, the 2000 rom-com starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. In What Men Want, Taraji P Henson plays Ali, a self-absorbed and ambitious agent working in the male-dominated world of sports management. While she represents a number of Olympic athletes, she hasn’t got an NBA,…
Bernadette Robinson brings sizzle to the Melbourne Recital Centre, paying homage to some of the greatest female singers to have played at Carnegie Hall. It is an emotion-charged 85-minute set with the 40-piece Australian Pops Orchestra, conducted by David Young, featuring musical director Mark Jones on piano. Time and again, Robinson extracts maximum value from…
Many comics seem to be insecure, unhappy, lonely. They turn to comedy as a way of dealing with their emotional pain, and they often use humour as a defence mechanism. And this the plight of the heroine in Funny Cow. This unapologetically bleak tale follows a damaged woman trying to make it in the male-dominated…
ART is just the sort of theatre work that we need right now. It’s funny; it makes you laugh; it cheers you up if you’re feeling down – all those good things. And even if that’s all it does, then that’s perfectly okay. Luckily, it does a little more than that because it also raises…
Whoever coined the phrase “the more things change, the more things stay the same” may well have been referring to the plot of Home Chat. Almost 100 years since Noel Coward wrote and presented this play in London, its underlying themes of feminism and empowerment continue to resonate in society. The main character Janet Ebony…
Carla Simón’s autobiographical feature debut, Summer 1993, is an evocative depiction of family lost and found. In (predictably) the summer of 1993, following the death of her parents, six-year old Frida (Laia Artigas) leaves bustling Barcelona for the Catalan provinces to live with her aunt (Bruna Cusí) and uncle (David Verdaguer). Country life is a…
Queen Victoria formed an attachment late in life that brought the royal household to the point of apoplexy. That true story is given poetic licence in Victoria & Abdul. In 1887, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal) – a 24-year-old clerk – travelled from India to the UK to present a ceremonial medal as part of the…
The first thing that came to my mind while watching Apostle, was the movie The Witch. It takes place in the same time period. Here, too, an old-fashioned sounding English is spoken. And it’s also a religion-tinted theme. The biggest difference with The Witch is that I thought that one was rather boring and not…
Frackman sounds like he should be a new addition to the Marvel stable of superheroes. But Dayne Pratzky is no superhero – rather he is just an average farmer from Queensland with little interest in politics or geopolitics until he became an accidental activist through his campaign against global energy companies who wanted to sink…
Of all the horror tropes, witches have had a lean run lately. Seems you can’t turn around without a new movie about zombies, vampires or ghosts being released; but witches have somehow stayed quietly in the background. Until now that is, and the release of Robert Eggers’ genuinely creepy indie film, The Witch. An audience…
