The rough lot of an impoverished farming clan is front and centre in Gundog, a dramatic and confronting play with lashes of humour. Although written by Simon Longman from the West Midlands and set on a remote, rundown property in the UK, it fits comfortably into the Australian milieu. The introduction makes quite the impression, courtesy…
Consent is at the core of the coming-of-age drama How to Have Sex. Frankly, this is a film that needs to be seen by teenagers and their parents and grandparents. Everything seems to be going as it does when youngsters let their hair down, until a line is crossed. After that, there’s no coming back….
Relatively Speaking, by Alan Ayckbourn, was his first big commercial hit, in1967. It had a cast that included Michael Hordern, Celia Johnson and introduced Richard Briers to the London West End. The play, originally called Meeting My Father, came out of the ‘revolutionary’ era of the English Swinging Sixties with all its entertainment taboo explorations…
A lively French box-office hit, Monsieur Chocolat details a fascinating rise-and-fall story. This is the tale of the first popular Afro-Cuban artist on the French stage. His real name was Rafael Padilla; but he became known as Chocolat. Padilla was only nine years old when sold into slavery. He then escaped to a different life. Set…
The Coen brothers are steeped in the lore of Westerns. Even leaving aside their direct remake of True Grit, many of their films – I’m thinking Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There and No Country for Old Men – tap into the tropes of the genre. So it makes a lot of sense that…
Comic Russell Brand has always enjoyed a bit of social activism. Now he teams up with prolific director Michael Winterbottom (The Trip) for this polemic on the evils of corporate greed and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor in the modern world. The rich keep getting richer while the poor continue to…
Former professional snowboarder Allie Reynolds wrote what she knew in her debut thriller Shiver. That book centred around the reunion of a group of old friends at an isolated ski resort when things start to go wrong. The world of professional snowboarding and the competitive nature of the characters comes very much into play in…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 8 January 2021. Two years ago, what Henrik Appel intended as a side project ended up becoming a full-scale reinvention. After years spent establishing himself as one of the key figures of Stockholm’s punk underground – cutting his teeth…
Finally, a sequel I can get behind! Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact Pixar have taken nine years to come up with a sequel to 2015’s Inside Out, but they’ve delivered something pretty special with Inside Out 2. I think the main reason this film works is that it actually makes sense….
Marcel Marceau was regarded as the world’s foremost mime artist. But I dare say many would be unaware of intriguing his back story, as covered in Resistance. From his earliest, Marceau (Jesse Eisenberg) was driven to “perform”; something his religious Jewish father, Charles Mangel (Karl Markovics), railed against. There was a reason for that, which…
