Blaze is a confronting coming-of-age drama. It deals with themes of the emotional and physical effects of trauma, including sexual violence, and is not an easy film to sit through. Blaze (Julia Savage) is a 12-year-old schoolgirl who witnesses the brutal rape and murder of Hannah (Yael Stone) in a laneway. As a result, she…
From Oscar winning filmmaker Kevin MacDonald (Touching The Void) comes High & Low. This revealing documentary charts the rise and fall of legendary iconoclastic fashion designer John Galliano; who has been acclaimed as one of the greatest designers of the twentieth century. Galliano rose to prominence in London in the 1980s during the New Wave…
Tina Arena (Chicago) excels as the ill-fated Eva Perón in the revival of Evita at Arts Centre Melbourne. Acclaimed Brazilian operatic baritone Paulo Szot is her husband, Argentinian president Juan. Bringing the threads together as an energetic narrator is Kurt Kansley (The Lion King) as Ché, who represents a cynical member of the public. Also…
A highly-charged thriller, Everybody Knows is intoxicating cinema. It’s the work of brilliant Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi who has woven some of the finest stories in recent years including The Salesman, The Past and A Separation. In Everybody Knows, a vital and beautiful girl disappears. Suddenly family threads start to unravel as a shadow of…
There have been plenty of books and movies about pandemics. Given the current reality, if you want to read about a pandemic, it may be more satisfying to read about the more idiosyncratic, literary ones. For example, in Ling Ma’s Severance, people who succumbed to the virus found themselves endlessly repeating common tasks. But there…
What distinguishes Dance X is creativity and excellence in diverse forms of movement and the emotion it generates. Make no mistake, feelings surface and explode – that is certainly true in my case. There is a primal connection to the art form. In a special fortnight of dance at Arts Centre Melbourne, I started with…
Inspired by the 1933 film The Invisible Man starring Claude Rains and Gloria Stuart, and its 2020 reimagining, INVISIBLE is a sensory experience, not for the claustrophobic. That is made clear during a brief introduction, after which we are ushered into a refrigerated shipping container (that, fortunately, is not refrigerated), containing two rows of theatre…
Irish lyricism, bluster and blarney combine in Wild Mountain Thyme. This romantic drama has the sole purpose of joining a lovelorn woman and her timid neighbour. Rosemary Muldoon (Emily Blunt) grew up initially doubting her purpose until her father told her she was the white swan, like in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (which is a recurring…
The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature is the sequel to 2014’s original animation. It begins with Surly Squirrel (voiced by Will Arnett), his pug friend Precious (Maya Rudolph) and his best friend Buddy the rat living it up in a recently closed nut shop. Food is abundant and life is good … until the shop…
Masterful and highly imaginative comes this trans-formative piece of theatre making. From the get go, I was intrigued and stimulated. Entering the theatre space felt like stepping onto the set of a high budget science fiction movie. It was visually arresting. Eerie, otherworldly music was playing. Tinged in green was shiny black scaffolding that constituted…
