Adult entertainment at its glorious, risqué, musical and side-splitting best. That is what you are in for when you enter the house of debauchery that is Bernie Dieter’s Club Kabarett. Leaving little to the imagination, it is slick, sexy, salacious and oh so much fun. It is a superbly orchestrated show for the broad minded….
Backtrack is an atmospheric Aussie psychological thriller with supernatural undertones that borrows elements from the superior The Sixth Sense and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, among others. The film explores themes of grief, redemption, loss, forgiveness, and confronting the ghosts of the past. Troubled psychologist Peter Bower (played by Oscar winner Adrien Brody, from The…
Who was responsible for the assassination of Kim Jong-Nam, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un’s half-brother? And why? Were the two young women convicted of his murder duped into supposedly pranking him when, instead, they were applying a deadly nerve agent known as VX? These questions are answered in the comprehensive and compelling documentary, Assassins. It…
A prolific, iconic writer and feminist who lived life on her terms, Miles Franklin (14th October, 1879 – 19th September, 1954) is best known for her auspicious debut, My Brilliant Career. Her legacy lives on through her published works and with the announcement of the annual Miles Franklin Literary Award to a novel of literary…
At 80 pages, Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada (translated by David Boyd) is more a novella than a novel. But Oyamada manages to pack a punch into this brevity. The three connected stories that make up the novel explore issues of parenthood and responsibility from a Japanese perspective. In the first part of…
Hero or villain? Murderer? Campaigner for a democratic Russia? These are just some of the triggers in Citizen K, a fascinating documentary about Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was once Russia’s richest man (head of the oil giant Yukos) but now lives in exile In London. As you can imagine, Russian president Vladimir Putin features prominently. This…
A feel good Aussie comedy with dramatic undertones, Astroman really comes into its own in the second act. Set in 1984, the play centres on a 13-year-old indigenous kid, Jiembra Djalu (Kamil Ellis), who loves video games. He and his sporty twin, Sonny (Calen Tassone), their 16-year-old sister Natalie (Tahlee Fereday) and mother Michelle (Elaine…
English novelist Naomi Alderman gained plenty of attention for her last novel The Power, a speculative look at what might happen in a shift of global power. She has followed that book up with something a little closer to reality, but still on the speculative side. The Future takes as its premise three of the…
Re-tellings of Greek mythology are all the rage at the moment. Some recent forays back into this world include Madeline Miller’s Circe, Colm Tobin’s House of Names, Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. The Miller and Barker books, in particular, seek to put a more feminist, female-centric spin on…
A brilliant new musical set in racially charged America’s deep south in the ‘60s has just come to town and you only have a few days to see it. An 11-strong cast and “hidden” orchestra (they are behind a black floor to ceiling curtain) tell the story of a young woman who sets out on…
