Jock Serong has not done the same thing twice… until now. And even then, not really. The Burning Island is a sequel to Serong’s 2018 historical novel Preservation. Preservation drew on the true story of an epic land journey up the Australian coast in the very early days of the colony while also exploring the…
Smile is a genuinely scary and engaging psychological horror movie. It centres around a hard-working therapist in an emergency psychiatric unit, named Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon). As Dr Cotter is about to leave the facility after a particularly long shift, a young graduate student Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) enters shaking and clearly traumatised. In…
What a hoot! Who ever believed the disco ball was dead? Clearly they hadn’t seen VELVET, an ode to all that was great about the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Mostly that was about the music, but in this show – which claimed “Pick of the Fringe (Festival)” and “Best of The Fringe” awards – it…
If there’s something Travolta remained loyal to, then surely it’s his distinctive, sad look. Ever since I saw him the first time appearing in Saturday Night Fever (ages ago), he uses that sad expression. It always looks as if he’s going to burst out in tears. And the movie The Forger is substantively perfect for…
A Quiet Place: Day One is an origin story. But it could have been named how to avoid a “cat”astrophe – with all the screen time given to a moggy. The film goes back to when the blind but noise-sensitive creatures featured in A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place Part II (2020) invaded…
Disney favourites Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy introduce several of Disney’s heroes … and a few villains in the latest “On Ice” spectacular. Over two 40-minute halves, six broad storylines are explored. The first involves Ariel, Flounder and Sebastian, the crab from The Little Mermaid. Next up are the adventurous Moana, her…
Cyrano is a massive triumph. The MTC production of the season. A talented cast, headlined by writer and star Virginia Gay prove that the pen is mightier than the sword. This is a contemporary rewrite of the classic play by Edmond Rostand about a French army soldier and gifted poet with a particularly large nose enamoured…
The life-changing influence of platonic female relationships rarely gets covered in fiction, and for this alone Seven Lies deserves a tip of the hat. It’s not a subject matter many writers have invested in and anyone who has ever been or spent time around a teenage girl would know that the connections young women make…
The past and the present collide in a story that involves reframing a tainted history. We are in Gippsland in the 1840s and a white woman is discovered near death, washed up on a beach. Just what happened to her remains the stuff of myths, but she is said to have been rescued by and…
Much like the protagonist of Weike Wang’s debut Chemistry, Joan is the child of Chinese immigrants. But while the protagonist in Chemistry was having trouble getting her life together, Joan is very much in control of hers, possibly too much control. Joan’s world only starts to unravel a little when her father dies and she…
